A flock of over 100 historians, a handful of them conservative, most of them university-based, cast their votes in the 2021 Presidential Historians Survey. Not surprisingly, the results confirm what we feared, namely that fake news can quickly become fake history. This twist is especially obvious for the presidencies of Barack Obama, ranked 10th out of 44, and Donald Trump, picked 41st.
Prominent historian Douglas Brinkley has made my case for me. Among the most prolific of the historians participating, Brinkley has written books on Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and other historical figures.
Given Brinkley’s prestige and the many prizes he has won, he has no excuse for saying something quite so literally ignorant as what he said about Barack Obama in a CNN panel on the eve of Donald Trump’s inauguration:
He’s almost unimpeachable. He has governed with such honesty and integrity, and he’s not only leaving with that 60 percent [approval rating] we keep talking, but a growing reputation. And the legacy of having eight scandal-free years is going to look larger and larger in history.
The saying goes that a scandal is not a scandal until the New York Times calls it a “scandal” on the front page, and by that definition, yes, the Obama administration was scandal free. By any sane definition, however, the Obama administration was awash in scandal.
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