This'll cheer Jim up

[Gob]

Poll after poll has charted President Obama’s dipping approval rating in recent months, but Wednesday brought perhaps the cruelest cut to date: A new Quinnipiac University survey found that voters rate Mr. Obama as the country’s worst president since World War II.

With Mr. Obama deploying troops to Iraq, failing to find compromise with Congress and seeing major defeats in the Supreme Court, voters continue to sour on him. The new poll also revealed that more voters now say GOP nominee Mitt Romney would have been a better choice in 2012.

Quinnipiac found 45 percent of voters say the country would have been better off if Mr. Romney had been elected, while just 38 percent say Mr. Obama remains a better choice. Even Democrats aren’t so sure — just 74 percent of them told the pollsters Mr. Obama was clearly the better pick in the last election.

Voters also rated the man who swept into office in 2009 with a promise of “hope and change” as worse than even his predecessor, Republican President George W. Bush, who left office with terrible approval ratings.

“Over the span of 69 years of American history and 12 presidencies, President Barack Obama finds himself with President George W. Bush at the bottom of the popularity barrel,” said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll.

A Zogby Analytics Poll released Wednesday also found Mr. Obama slipping — in that survey, to 44 percent approval, while his disapproval jumped 4 percentage points from last month to reach 54 percent.

Nearly half of voters told the Zogby poll that Mr. Obama is “unable to lead the country.”

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Mr. Obama still has the ability to lead America, whatever the polls say.

“There’s no doubt the president has the leadership and stature necessary to call upon the American public to rally around the kinds of ideas that are in the best interests of the country,” he said.

But in his sixth year in office, Mr. Obama has turned increasingly to executive action to attack his policy goals, thereby mocking congressional Republicans for failing to work with him. On Tuesday, he ridiculed GOP efforts to rein in his executive powers with the threat of a lawsuit.

“As long as they’re doing nothing, I’m not going to apologize for trying to do something,” Mr. Obama said.

The president said this week that Americans are “extraordinarily cynical about Washington right now,” and the Quinnipiac survey shows that assessment is hurting Mr. Obama. A full 54 percent of voters believe the Obama administration is not competent at doing its primary job of running the government.

On overall job approval, Mr. Obama is upside-down by 13 points, with only 40 percent approving and 53 percent disapproving. That’s a 5 point slide since April.

The public doesn’t trust his handling of the economy (40 percent approval) or foreign policy (37 percent approval).

As much as voters are down on President Obama, the star of former President Ronald Reagan continues to soar. The two-term California Republican was rated as the best of the 12 presidents who have served since Franklin Delano Roosevelt by 35 percent of the voters polled by Quinnipiac, just short of twice the number of second-place Bill Clinton at 18 percent. John Kennedy came in third in the “best category” at 15 percent and Mr. Obama was fourth at 8 percent. No other chief executive got above 5 percent support.



Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/201 ... z36N9lKl3u

[Lord Jim]

While it's obviously fully justified that Mr. Reagan would finish first by a wide margin, it seems a bit unfair and premature to rate Obama as the worst...

Afterall, he has Jimmy Carter to contend with...

ETA:

Let me add that I naturally approached this thread with some trepidation...

My experience has been that when a thread is started with a subject line like "This'll cheer Jim up" the OP generally contains the most uncheery news...(Like The Traitor Snowden winning some award)

So kudos to Strop for starting a thread with that title that actually contained cheerful news...

[Long Run]

It's not really cheery knowing the population has come to the sad conclusion that we have our second in a row bottom rung president (although the recency phenomenon overstates how bad each the last two were).

Reagan gets the best rating 1) because he deserves it, and 2) Rs will favor Rs and Ds will favor Ds in this type of poll, and the only competition for the R vote is the understated Ike who served too long ago to get much support.

My ratings would be:

Rs
Reagan
Eisenhower
Bush Senior
Ford
Bush Two
Nixon (his severe shortcomings overwhelm the good things he did)

Ds
Truman (like Ike, too few remember his impact)
Clinton
Kennedy
Obama
Carter
Johnson (same issue as Nixon, could have been great but we are still dealing with his failures)

ETA:

The poll results and summary of questions is here: http://www.quinnipiac.edu/news-and-even ... aseID=2056

[Econoline]

My ratings would be:

Rs
Reagan
Eisenhower
Bush Senior
Ford
Bush Two
Nixon (his severe shortcomings overwhelm the good things he did)

Ds
Truman (like Ike, too few remember his impact)
Clinton
Kennedy
Obama
Carter
Johnson (same issue as Nixon, could have been great but we are still dealing with his failures)

Mine would be:

Rs
Eisenhower
Reagan
Bush One
Ford
Nixon
Bush Two (unlike Nixon, I can think of no redeeming qualities for him)

Ds
Truman
Clinton/Obama (tie, for two very different Presidents...with very different pluses)
Kennedy/Johnson (tie, because in some ways LBJ was a better JFK than JFK; in other ways he was way worse)
Carter




P.S. BTW, I thought the way you rated the Rs and Ds separately was a helpful way of approaching the question.

[Lord Jim]

Well, I have no problem ranking Mr. Reagan as number one...(If you're going to rank Cold War Presidents, it seems only fitting that you give first position to the man who won it...)

Truman was a mixed bag; he was forceful in some respects, (the steel strike) but embarrassingly naive in others ("I thought I could trust Old Joe" was a comment he once made about Stalin....)

I disagree with both of you on Kennedy and Johnson; the one really important thing Kennedy did was enact the biggest tax cut in US history; aside from that the thing he's best known for is The Cuban Missile Crisis (A "crisis" which would not even have happened had he not given Khrushchev the impression that he was a novice who could be rolled when they met in Vienna)

Johnson, on the other hand, was a real impact player.... The civil rights legislation he pushed through in the mid 60s has had a profound effect on our national structure that redounds to this day...

I always have a hard time ranking Mr. Nixon in these kinds of polls, because he's such a paradox...

On the one hand, in terms of pure intellect, he was probably the most intelligent man to occupy the Oval Office since Woodrow Wilson...

On the other hand, he was so emotionally and psychologically self-destructive, it's tough to view him well, (I feel the same way about Clinton...)

I guess the one thing that we can agree on is that Bush 43 and Carter were scrapping the bottom of the barrel...

Obama has been pretty much a failure in that range; I gave him high marks on Foreign Policy during his first term despite what a failure he was on domestic policy, and the way he pissed away the opportunity he had...

But in his second term he's become a true disaster in foreign policy, starting with that embarrassing Syria Fiasco...I haven't seen a President with such a deer-in-the head-lights, thumb sucker, navel-gazing foreign policy since the darkest days of Jimmy Carter...

I don't know who he's getting his advice from these days, but I think he misses the counsel of Hillary Clinton and Bob Gates, and the country is poorer for it...

[TPFKA@W]

Worst President ever was Lyndon Johnson who picked his dogs up by their ears.


http://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comme ... hnson_dog/


Sick, clueless son of a bitch.

[Lord Jim]

I'll give GWB one thing over Carter; he's been a much better former President.

He hasn't constantly publicly carped at his successor the way Carter did. He hasn't allowed himself to be used as a propaganda tool by countries hostile to the US by flying to their capitols and publicly denouncing America's government of the day, like Carter has. And most importantly, he hasn't scoured the globe looking for new things to fuck up, the way Carter does.

[Sue U]

I really don't get the adulation of Reagan; he was at best a mediocre president in terms of leadership, with an objectively terrible record both domestically and in foreign policy.

At home, the economy was souring at his election, but he brought it to near-shambles in his first term, with a deep recession, record unemployment (nearly 11% nationwide) and astronomical interest rates (by 1982, the prime rate was over 21%); large banks were failing at the greatest rate since the Depression, and the tanking economy accelerated insolvency problems in the savings & loan industry into a full-blown crisis and regulatory scandal.

Overseas, Reagan's involvement of the U.S. in Lebanon's civil war was an unmitigated disaster. Aside from the well-known Marine barracks bombing that killed more than 250 American servicemen in October 1983, six months earlier there had been an attack on the American embassy in Beirut that killed 63 people, and in March of the following year the CIA station chief was kidnapped, tortured and eventually murdered. Of course, Reagan's response to the Lebanon debacle was to invade Grenada, a bullying PR move universally condemned as a violation international law. And I haven't even yet mentioned the arms-for-hostages/Iran-Contra scandal; support for the Afghan mujaheddin, i.e., the Taliban and al-Qaeda; support for the apartheid regime in South Africa; the series of conflicts with Libya that ultimately resulted in the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie; support for brutal military regimes and right-wing death squads in Guatemala and El Salvador; support for Saddam Hussein while selling arms to Iran; and the withdrawal of any U.S. involvement in Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy, enabling the First Intifada.

As far as "rating" post-WWII presidents, it's difficult if not impossible because there is just so much sheer awful mixed in with some very very good. But I think I'd rank them about like this:

Truman
Johnson
Kennedy
Eisenhower
Clinton
Nixon
Obama
Ford
GHW Bush
Reagan
Carter
GW Bush

[Guinevere]

Agreed, there is too much awful. My list goes like this:

Truman
Kennedy
Clinton
Johnson
Nixon
Obama
Eisenhower
GHWB
Ford
Reagan
Carter
GW Bush

[Long Run]

astronomical interest rates (by 1982, the prime rate was over 21%);

You might want to check your facts: http://www.fedprimerate.com/wall_street ... istory.htm

Highest prime rate ever = 21.5% 12/9/1980, Carter is still president (prime was 6.75% when he became president).

It gradually declined during Reagan's presidency and trended back up toward the end, but by then the economy was strong and inflation was under control (15.75 at the end of 1981, 11.5/1982, 11/1983, 10.75/1984, 9.5/1985, 7.5/1986, 8.75/1987, 10.5/1988, 10.5/1989). The high prime rate was necessary to get the high inflation under control (mainly caused by Carter's first Fed chief). I will give Carter some credit for changing course and agreeing to appoint Volcker who ran the interest rates up to fight inflation, an effort that Reagan supported as he realized the pernicious effects of high inflation.

[Sue U]

You might want to check your facts

"That's what I get for relying on Wikipedia." -- Abraham Lincoln.

[rubato]

astronomical interest rates (by 1982, the prime rate was over 21%);

You might want to check your facts: http://www.fedprimerate.com/wall_street ... istory.htm

Highest prime rate ever = 21.5% 12/9/1980, Carter is still president (prime was 6.75% when he became president).

It gradually declined during Reagan's presidency and trended back up toward the end, but by then the economy was strong and inflation was under control (15.75 at the end of 1981, 11.5/1982, 11/1983, 10.75/1984, 9.5/1985, 7.5/1986, 8.75/1987, 10.5/1988, 10.5/1989). The high prime rate was necessary to get the high inflation under control (mainly caused by Carter's first Fed chief). I will give Carter some credit for changing course and agreeing to appoint Volcker who ran the interest rates up to fight inflation, an effort that Reagan supported as he realized the pernicious effects of high inflation.

Carter inherited the spiking high inflation of the 1970s, the forces which brought about the 2nd spike* were left in place by Nixon-Ford, and had the wisdom and balls to appoint Paul Volcker; even Allen Greenspan (who Reagan Appointed) has said he would not have had the courage of Volcker.


yrs,
rubato

* A Fed which printed more money every time unemployment went up and vulnerability to oil price shocks caused by price controls.

[Lord Jim]

Carter inherited the spiking high inflation of the 1970s

Christ on a bike, why do you persist in repeating that falsehood over and over again no matter how many times evidence is put before you blowing it out of the water? Is it shameless dishonesty, or do you simply lack the intellectual capacity to retain new information?

Here are the inflation rates at the beginning of the year from Jan. 1975 through Jan. 1980:

Jan 1, 1980 13.91%
Jan 1, 1979 9.28%
Jan 1, 1978 6.84%
Jan 1, 1977 5.22%
Jan 1, 1976 6.72%
Jan 1, 1975 11.80%
http://www.multpl.com/inflation/table

And here' a link to a table that will show you the inflation rate month by month:

http://inflationdata.com/Inflation/Infl ... ation.aspx

The reality of course is, (as opposed to the fantasy that you keep repeating) that it was Gerald Ford who inherited the "spiking high inflation of the 1970's" and it was under Gerald Ford that inflation was being brought back under control.

In August of 1974, the month Ford took Office, the inflation rate stood at 10.86%. It then continued to rise till December of that year, peaking that month at 12.34%, (The Highest rate under the Carter Inflation was in March of 1980, 14.76%) and then went steadily south until Ford left Office in January of 1977, when the rate stood at 5.22%, less than half the rate he had inherited 2 and a half years earlier. Carter inherited a consistently declining inflation rate, NOT "the spiking high inflation of the 1970s".

Then almost immediately upon his taking Office, inflation starts rising again...reaching spectacular heights, far worse than what was seen in the early 70's...

During the Nixon-Ford inflationary period, the inflation rate stood above 10% for 15 months...

Under Carter, after he had an inherited a rate that had declined to a little over 5%, the inflation rate stood at over 10% for twenty-five consecutive months including 15 months when the rate was higher than it ever got under Nixon-Ford, and on the day Carter left Office the rate was more than twice as high as the rate on the day he entered office.

Facts are very stubborn things rube, no matter how much contempt you have for them.

[Big RR]

Of course, the second oil embargo contributed mightily to that inflation, especially with the fuel economy of cars at that time. Not saying Carter was blameless, but he inherited a lot of the circumstances that resulted in that inflation rate.

[Sue U]

The reality of course is, (as opposed to the fantasy that you keep repeating) that it was Gerald Ford who inherited the "spiking high inflation of the 1970's" and it was under Gerald Ford that inflation was being brought back under control.

Yeah, Ford's WIN ("Whip Inflation Now") campaign was genius.

That said, the closest I ever came to voting for a Republican for President was Gerald Ford against Jimmy Carter. I do not believe the nation would have been any worse off had Ford been elected.

[Lord Jim]

the closest I ever came to voting for a Republican for President was Gerald Ford against Jimmy Carter.

Just think Sue...

If Ford had been re-elected in '76, Mr. Reagan would probably never have been President...

[Guinevere]

I almost voted for Bush I over Dukakis. And while he did reauthorize the Clean Air Act (Amended in 1990), I don't think I can ever forgive him for the uselessness that is Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court.

[Sue U]

the closest I ever came to voting for a Republican for President was Gerald Ford against Jimmy Carter.

Just think Sue...

If Ford had been re-elected in '76, Mr. Reagan would probably never have been President...

You can't blame me for that; New Jersey went for Ford in '76. (Also too, Ford would have been elected, not re-elected, as he had never been elected either Preznit or Veep.)

On the other hand, if Ford had won, Teddy Kennedy might have been elected in '80.

[Lord Jim]

And let's not forget The Misery Index...

"The Misery Index" was a concept originally devised by the economist Arthur Okun, but it was seized on by the Carter campaign as a major attack element against Ford...Carter grabbed hold of it and made it his own...

From a campaign strategy standpoint it was a smart and shrewd move...It had all the elements you want in a campaign theme:

First, the way it was computed was easy for the average person to understand; all The Misery Index" is, is the adding of the unemployment and inflation rates into a single number; so if the unemployment rate was 6% and the inflation rate was 6% the "Misery Index" would be 12%...

Second, the two elements of the index, (inflation and unemployment) were also easy for the average person to understand; everyone could see the evidence of inflation in their everyday life, and even if every person wasn't unemployed, they understood well what that meant in practical real-life terms...

And third, (and this was the particularly shrewd part about embracing this from a political standpoint) even if both of the numbers were coming down by combining the two, you could still come up with a number that would sound frighteningly high to the average person...

Especially when you gave the number a name like "Misery Index"...

The Carter campaign seized on this and laid on with a will, hammering it relentlessly...

Cater trumpeted it in his stump speeches, (as did his surrogates) he brought it up in the debates with Ford, he used it over and over in his campaign commercials...

Under Gerald Ford, "The Misery Index" is too high!

Well now...

Pop quiz...

Here are the "Misery Index" numbers for three successive US Presidents:

Gerald Ford:

Start: 16.36..... End: 12.66.....Change: -3.70

Jimmy Carter:

Start: 12.72 .....End: 19.72.....Change: +7.00

Ronald Reagan:

Start: 19.33 .....End: 9.72.....Change: -9.61

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misery_ind ... onomics%29

Now, in order from best to worst, please rank the Presidencies of the these three individuals based on "The Misery Index"....


............

..........


...........

Alright, pencils down....


(I realize that between this quiz and the last one on offensive American Indian Sports Symbols, I run the risk of getting a reputation for being an "easy A"...I'll try to make the next one a little tougher... )

[Lord Jim]

On the other hand, if Ford had won, Teddy Kennedy might have been elected in '80.

Great, now I'm going to have nightmares...