President Obama Named 5th Best President in History by University-Fiction!
Summary of eRumor:
President Obama has been named the 5th best president in history by the University of Georgia or Texas A&M, depending on the version of the eRumor.
The Truth:
President Obama was named the 5th best president by the University of Georgia or by Texas A&M.
Those rumors started in March 2014 with a post at Zipper Weasel, a spoof website with the tag line “Scouring the Bowels of the Internet.” The story, which appeared under the headline “Texas A&M Study: Obama The Fifth Best President in History” showed a screen shot of the so-called study that ranked the top five presidents as such
1 Reagan & Lincoln tied for first
2 Seventeen presidents tied for second
3 Twenty-three presidents tied for third
4 Jimmy Carter came in fourth, and…
5 Obama was fifth
Considering that Obama was the 44th president of the United States, and that the so-called study lists 43 former presidents as finishing ahead of him, it was obviously a gag meant to imply that Obama was actually the worst president in U.S. history.
Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz fanned the flames in 2014 by retweeting the Texas A&M study with the hashtag #AggieJoke — but many of Cruz’s followers simply read the headline and missed the joke:
That led a Texas A&M official to go on the record with The Eagle, the university’s student newspaper, to clarify that the so-called study was a hoax:
The study is clearly a joke. The click-bait headline combines Texas A&M + Obama + “best president,” but when you read through the “methodology” Obama is actually the worst president.
The A&M spokesman said the chain-joke-spam-letter first cropped up in the early fall and that he wasn’t sure why it had just resurfaced. He said the university had not formally distanced themselves from the study because officials didn’t want to help it spread.
Not that there was ever any doubt, but Texas A&M University has nothing to do with the chain study about President Barack Obama that’s spreading around. An A&M spokesman said it’s a hoax. The statement attributed to the “Public Relations Office at A&M” is fabricated.
The post has caught fire recently and was tweeted out by U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz on Thursday afternoon. It’s all over right-wing blogs and the social media accounts of the faithful.
As the end of President Obama’s final term in office neared its end in 2016, the hoax study finding that Obama was the 5th best president in history went viral again. In this version, however, the University of Georgia had ranked Obama 5th best. The new version was a variation on the previous hoax.