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The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians
Simon & Schuster
July 2012
On Sale: June 26, 2012
288 pages ISBN: 1451625405 EAN: 9781451625400 Kindle: B0061QAYNU Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction History
The author of the acclaimed biography of President James
Polk, A Country of Vast Designs, offers a fresh,
playful, and challenging way of playing “Rating the
Presidents,” by pitching historians’ views and subsequent
experts’ polls against the judgment and votes of the
presidents’ own contemporaries. Merry posits that presidents rise and fall based on
performance, as judged by the electorate. Thus, he explores
the presidency by comparing the judgments of historians with
how the voters saw things. Was the president reelected? If
so, did his party hold office in the next election? Where They Stand examines the chief executives Merry
calls "Men of Destiny," those who set the country toward new
directions. There are six of them, including the three
nearly always at the top of all academic polls—Lincoln,
Washington, and FDR. He describes the "Split-Decision
Presidents" (including Wilson and Nixon)—successful in their
first terms and reelected; less successful in their second
terms and succeeded by the opposition party. He describes
the “Near Greats’’ (Jefferson, Jackson, Polk, TR, Truman),
the “War Presidents’’ (Madison, McKinley, Lyndon Johnson),
the flat-out failures (Buchanan, Pierce), and those whose
standing has fluctuated (Grant, Cleveland, Eisenhower). This voyage through our history provides a probing and
provocative analysis of how presidential politics works and
how the country sets its course. Where They Stand
invites readers to pitch their opinions against the voters
of old, the historians, the pollsters—and against the author
himself. In this year of raucous presidential politics,
Where They Stand will provide a context for the
unfolding campaign drama.
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