For this Presidents Day installment of DCist’s ongoing series featuring overlooked local monuments, we asked ourselves: Who was the worst president of all time? It is always popular to maintain that the current officeholder is it, especially these days. But it’s worth looking a bit further back to consider the legacy of James Buchanan, our 15th president, who nonetheless managed to rate a memorial.

Buchanan can be found along the eastern wall of the Italian-inspired lower half of Meridian Hill/Malcolm X Park (an AIA guide calls it “generic Italian”). There he sits, the work of Hans “Monument Maker” Schuler, eight feet tall and bronze, seated with his head tilted slightly forward as if ashamed of himself, but atually just as he really did, owing to poor eyesight.

Otherwise, he can be found at the bottom of presidential rankings, most recently in The Wall Street Journal’s 2004 assessment, “Presidential Leadership.” In the chapter on Buchanan, comic novelist Christopher Buckley lists the phrases historian Jean Harvey Baker once used to describe him …