Much of this sort of debate hinges on things we can't define in any useful way. What does a "favorability" rating mean?
Does it mean that we think he is a "good man"?
I don't think he is. After watching him in action for years, I'd say BJC is an absolutely hollow man - there's nothing at all inside of him. It's weird - I don't think I've ever seen anything like it elsewhere. Jesse Jackson once said something similar about BJC, and if he was accurately quoted, it's just about the only thing JJ and I agree on. George Will opined that BJC was the worst man to ever occupy the presidential office, making clear that he was not saying that he was the worst president - a useful distinction. If Aaron Burr had ended up president after the 1800 election, I think he might have given BJC a run for the title of worst man in the office. Maybe.
Does it mean we think BJC is "a skillful politician"?
I don't think he's that, either. Politically, he was astonishing clumsy. I voted for him the first time around. Almost immediately, he bungled the Somalia operation. Recall that Bush Senior had, right at the end of his term, initiated an operation to use US army resources and capabilities to airlift food and medical supplies into Somalia, to alleviate some of the human suffering caused by a chronic civil war. While a laudable intention, I thought that was a mistake, as it was likely to grow into a commitment, which would saddle his successor with another problem; the classic example of that was the Eisenhower administration's plan for a little something involving Cuba, which Kennedy allowed to proceed in its half-baked, unfinished, poorly planned version as the notorious Bay of Pigs embarrassment. As it turned out, Bush Sr made a much better job of it - the goods were delivered, and US forces left. But then BJC almost immediately sent them back in to chase after some Somali warlord who may or may not have been annoying somebody. The goal was a bad idea, the plan was slapdash, US forces were committed with inadequate resources (recall that they were picked up by Pakistani troops who were allowed to have armored personnel carriers), and the US looked like a bunch of weak pansy surrender-monkeys while Osama took notes.
OK, so he wasn't too good on foreign affairs. Well, I figured at the time, nobody's perfect. How about domestic politics? Immediately after the inauguration, BJC allowed himself to be run in circles by the press. "Gays in the military" became the crisis du jour. WTF? That was hardly a campaign issue. The press set on him, as it likes to do - that's fancied as "speaking truth to power", even if the truth is some trumped-up garbage - and BJC let them do it. He weaseled out of it with "don't ask, don't tell" - which isn't a policy, it's a dodge. I'm not faulting him for trying to avoid a no-win question, I'm faulting him for allowing an unelected and crisis-driven press to set the agenda. He allowed the press to dominate him right from the beginning. Bush Jr avoided that, usually, by ignoring the press - not ideal, but probably a better approach than BJC's.
Then we had NAFTA touted as some great accomplishment - oh look, he managed to get this thing through congress! Woo-hoo! Actually, that congress was desperate to get NAFTA (for better or worse), so BJC fought hard to - give congress exactly what it wanted. Hmmm. And what did he get in return, political horse-trading-wise? As I recall, he sold out for nothing much in return. Well, that doesn't make a man a red-hot political operative.
The most memorable domestic political "accomplishment" of BJC's presidential career, the one which will be used in TV documentaries about America and the presidency for the next century or more, was when he looked right at the camera (that is, at us, the electorate), wagged his finger, and told us that he hadn't done what we later learned, in spades, he had indeed done. The "crime" itself was trivial - some middle-aged satyr prancing about the office where some genuinely great men have done some genuinely great work, while distasteful, hardly counts as the crime of the century. But the finger wag was the memorable part - how dare we actually ask a question of him! Who are we, anyway? Actually, we're his bosses - try wagging a finger at the guy behind the desk the next time you go into a job interview and see how that works out. If he had handled it in just about any other way, the results couldn't have been worse. Making a situation worse by his posturing is not the sign of a skillful politician.
And then there was the spectacle of Hillarycare. The less said about that amateurish debacle, the better.
OK, so he's no miracle man on foreign or domestic politics. How was he on the "bully pulpit"? That has been a useful, maybe even vital, tool of the Presidency since Teddy R's skillful utilization in the trustbuster days. FDR's boosting of, well, socialism, and LBJ's pitches for the Great Society were further campaigns run from the bully pulpit. Did BJC use the pulpit to get America talking and thinking about some previously invisible social crises?
Well, no. He gave long diffuse speeches which never revealed a clear thought or insight, or hinted at anything which hadn't been said better by other men thirty years earlier. (I'm comparing BJC's bloviations to Kennedy, whose speeches I'm just barely able to remember.) His inability to move the conversation past the current stumbling blocks was astonishing. He could never get, say, abortion, past a "woman's right to choose." If that was enough, the problem would be long past. Rote repetition of simple-minded mantras is a job for a TV spot or a full-page ad in the Times, not for the presidential pulpit.
BJC never really said or did anything presidential - he never really stopped campaigning. Normally once one gets into the office, it's time to stop talking about how wonderful it's going to be and to start doing it. That never happened. At best he went from telling us what a great president he'd be (or what a great president the two of them would be - remember that "two for the price of one" fantasy?) to constant speculation about how history would remember him. But remember him for what? Being obsessed with how history would remember him, apparently. In that case, he's probably at the top - I'm aware of no other American president who fretted so much, and so publicly, about the question, while doing nothing substantial or at least memorable to answer it.
I don't believe BJC wanted to be president at all - he wanted to be JFK, and probably did ever since he met JFK when he was a kid. Of course war hero was out of the question; whether BJC was a draft-dodger or not isn't such an important question, and I'm inclined to give anyone the benefit of the doubt on that. But unlike JFK, BJC certainly didn't do anything to try to rescue his shipwrecked crew. So skip that - maybe he could still be a pseudo-JFK. The measure of his failure? Compare Marilyn Monroe to Monica.
So, maybe BJC didn't make very good use of the pulpit. What else might a "favorability" rating mean? The late Arthur Schlesinger Jr (a historian, not to be confused with James Schlesinger, sometime member of various US cabinets) occasionally published a poll taken among American historians and other poobahs, rating the US presidents. What's mainly clear is that even people who have studied the question can't really agree on what makes a great, or good, or poor President. On thing that Schlesinger's pollees seem to agree on was that the pre-Civil War presidents , from Zach Taylor to Buchanan, get poor ratings, I'd guess for basically fiddling while the slave states burned. I think BJC will end up being ranked down there with those paragons. In fact the BJC presidency can be seen as eight years of lost opportunities. It wasn't so much what he did as what he didn't do, should have done, or could have done which defined the BJC years.