It doesn’t seem fair that Warren Harding is stuck with them. His appointees presided over several really juicy political scandals, including Teapot Dome, which was both one of the worst corruption cases in American history as well as the one with the most interesting name. That was definitely bad, but not really in the same ballpark.

His defenders, like Robenalt and Dean, point out that Harding was, for his time, extremely progressive when it came to racial issues. Plus he got the Senate to approve an international disarmament agreement, which seems impressive when viewed from an era in which the Senate is incapable of rubber-stamping the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities.

Harding’s longtime lover and correspondent, Carrie Phillips, was a German sympathizer during World War I and Robenalt thinks she was actually a German spy. Her family disagrees. Either way, it’s pretty clear from the letters that, while Harding loved her “pillowing breasts,” he had very little appreciation for her theories about foreign affairs.

Nothing nearly that interesting appears to be going on in the current White House. Maybe the public is just bored. “The sixth year is tough for everybody,” said Tim Malloy, a spokesman for the Quinnipiac University poll, which recently announced that it had surveyed 1,446 registered voters, about a third of whom thought Obama is the worst president since 1945. George W. Bush came in second at 28 percent. This isn’t all that wide a margin, until you ask yourself who was running the show when the economy crashed and Iraq got invaded.

After the results came in, Malloy said, the researchers looked back at recent two-term presidents and concluded that all of them bottomed out in the middle of their second term. It makes sense that in a world of incessant communication, there’s just so much you can take of any chief executive. The guy we’ve been stuck with for a long time seems awful, because he’s the guy we’ve been stuck with for a long time. Our attitude toward him doesn’t improve until we’ve been reminded that things could be much worse.

Nearly half the respondents told Quinnipiac that they thought the country would be better off if Obama had lost the last election. It’s an opinion that could easily be reversed by an actual threat of the return of Mitt Romney.