A July Quinnipiac poll asked the public who has been the worst president since 1945. The big winner (or should I say loser) was President Barack Obama, with 33 percent. It’s easy to see why if we compare him to some of the other men who often make the worst-presidents list.

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1. Warren G. Harding

U.S. News and World Report has its own popular list of the worst presidents and provides some justification for its selections. With respect to Harding, who succeeded Woodrow Wilson, U.S. News says he was an ineffectual leader who played golf while “while appointees and cronies plundered the U.S. government in a variety of creative ways.” One example: the Veterans Administration with its hospital system was created under Harding, and from the very start it was plagued with fraud, cronyism, exploding budgets and terrible medical care.

Um, kinda sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

2. Jimmy Carter

Carter only shows up on a few of the worst-presidents lists, but he should lead them. He singlehandedly undermined U.S. foreign policy so that two-bit ayatollahs and terrorists felt free to challenge us.

During his presidential campaign he hammered incumbent Gerald Ford with economist Arthur Okun’s “Misery Index,” which combines the unemployment and inflation rates. But Carter ended up with the highest overall Misery Index (16.26) ever, as well as the highest monthly level—21.98 in June 1980, four months before Ronald Reagan and the voters gave Carter a little taste of misery.

3. Herbert Hoover

U.S. News says, “He was known as a poor communicator who fueled trade wars and exacerbated the Depression.” As we have seen lately, Obama is a terrible communicator when there is no teleprompter, forcing the White House to repeatedly say, “What the president meant to say …”

Obama came close to initiating a trade war with Mexico and China by slapping tariffs on certain products, like Chinese-made tires. And his economic policies have turned what should have been a sharp, but limited, economic recession into the slowest economic recovery since, well, the Great Depression.

4. Ulysses S. Grant

Grant is widely recognized as a person with good intentions, but corruption permeated his administration. He apologized for those problems by saying, “My failures have been errors of judgment, not of intent.”

Sounds a little like a November 2013 Obama statement after the rollout of healthcare.gov: “I am sorry that they, you know, are finding themselves in this situation, based on assurances they got from me … because, you know, my intention is to lift up and make sure the insurance that people buy is effective — that it’s actually going to deliver what they think they’re purchasing.”

The public in the Quinnipiac poll surely got it right by calling Obama the worst president since 1945. He’s lower on the Misery Index that Jimmy Carter, but only because there has been no inflation.

Whether Obama will stay on the bottom rung for years to come is difficult to predict. Professors of political science, who are generally very liberal, often control those later assessments, and they will be inclined to give Obama a higher rank for his liberalism.

Plus, if Hillary Clinton wins the 2016 presidential election, that will almost surely move Obama up to the second worst president.