lorim wrote:
What was the standard for the ranking. The worse president according to what criteria. Not that I disagree with any of these.
They averaged the results of five different relatively recent polls in an effort to minimize the inherent biases of different groups of professionals. BTW, U.S. News & World Report is considered to have a conservative bias.

The polls (as reported in the magazine):
  1. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s 1996 poll surveyed 32 specialists, mostly historians and political scientists but also two politicians. It used the same five categories that his father's did, and, with few exceptions, the respondents were liberal to left in their politics.
  2. The 1996 Riding-McGiver survey, conducted by attorney William Ridings and magazine editor Stuart McGiver, polled 719 historians and political scientists as well as selected politicians, activists, and journalists, asking them to rank the presidents in five broad categories of performance and also to list their picks for the 10 best and 10 worst presidents.
  3. The 1999 C-Span poll called on approximately 90 historians and presidential experts, asking them to rate the presidents according to 10 criteria adding up to overall performance. (C-Span also ran a viewer poll at the same time.)
  4. The 2002 Sienna Research Institute polled more than 200 academic specialists, asking them to consider 20 categories including overall performance.
  5. The 2005 Wall Street Journal poll, conducted with the conservative Federalist Society, sought a balance of identifiable liberals and conservatives among the some 130 scholars it approached. Eighty-five scholars responded, rating the president on a five-point scale, the mean scores being adjusted to give equal weight to liberal- and conservative-leaning respondents.