Some bystanders rate Donald Trump America's worst president. But ratings are fluid, as shown by ratings given the last Ohioan in the White House, Marion's Warren G. Harding.
One of the best-known sets of presidential "ratings" was skippered by the elder Arthur M. Schlesinger, and published in 1962 in The New York Times Magazine. It rated Abraham Lincoln as our greatest president. In contrast, it classified Presidents U.S. Grant (1869-1877) and Warren Harding (1921-1923) as "failures," the survey's lowest rank. Grant, a celebrated Civil War commander, could plead "political inexperience," Schlesinger wrote, but Harding had "worked intimately with the Ohio Gang" - crooked Statehouse pals - "which had accompanied him to Washington."
Truth is, Harding, a Republican, gets something of a bad rap. For instance, he freed Socialist Eugene V. Debs from prison by commuting Debs' ten-year federal sentence to time served. Woodrow Wilson's "liberal" administration had prosecuted Debs because of an anti-war speech he made in Canton's Nimisilla Park in 1918.
And Harding's Cabinet had some solid members. Still, when your interior secretary goes to jail on corruption charges (for letting private oil companies exploit what were supposed to be the U.S. Navy's petroleum reserves), and your attorney general (one-time Ohio Statehouse lobbyist Harry M. Daugherty, a native of Washington Court House) is twice tried on other corruption charges, it's hard to bracket Harding's presidency with, say, Lincoln's and George Washington.
Truth or Consequences is more than a town in New Mexico and definitely more than a game show.