Have Good Businessmen Made Good Presidents?

I've been writing a lot lately about the Guinta/Shea-Porter race for NH first district rep, and also on the presidential race.  The Patch has become my favorite place to comment.   Thanks Exeter Patch for this opportunity to start a conversation.

We've all heard many times by now that Mitt Romney's business experience is what the country needs.   It sounds reasonable -- if you want business, elect the business guy.   I thought I'd look back into our history to see how well the best businessmen worked out as president.

Does prior success in business generally result in a successful presidency?  This piece in Entrepreneur Magazine picked Warren G. Harding, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter, and George W. Bush as the four most successful businessman who became president.   I try to capture their history, as well as a non-partisan rank, in the graphic.  I got the biographies from the Entrepreneur piece, with additional material from Wikipedia.   The ranking I use is Wikipedia's aggregated scholar survey rank, which combines the rankings from 17 different non-partisan surveys.

If you like this sort of thing and want more, or hate it and want to vent, please check out my blog NotIntaGuinta.org. 

I'm not sure how the photo will appear here.  You may have to click on it to enlarge it enough to read.