Bush came in second???!!???

Check out the actual Gallup link your article points to:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/145394/Barack-Obama-Hillary-Clinton-2010-Admi...?

in the second chart "2010 Most Admired Man by Party ID," all is explained. He got to that placement on the list with only 11% of Republicans and 3% of Independents putting him there. Clearly, there were a lot of different answers to the question, and after Obama, there wasn't really anyone in the running for "most admired man." It was just a situation of a few more saying George Bush or Bill Clinton to make those too rise to 4/5% overall rather than the 2% many others got.

It's similar with the women--Clinton, Palin and Winfrey simply have slightly larger groups of admirers than the others on the list.

It also helps to keep the actual quesiton in mind, In context, Obama's numbers here aren't very surprisingt. It's easy to admire a very ambitious black man who set his sights on the American presidency in a time when many still said a black president wasn't possible, and achieved it in a few short years. Oprah rates high for similar reasons.

FWIW, content created by Yahoo News often strikes me as doing what happened here--they often do a kind of Reader's Digest news, summing it up not quite right--that if you check their links, it's like they didn't really read them with full attention. Not intentional spinning, just looking for something anything to make a interesting headline.