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Obama is the worst president since WWII

Neally said:
Absent a more refined statistical metric as I've discussed, I'll go with overall averages. http://www.gallup.com/poll/124922/presidential-job-approval-center.aspx Putting him in the bottom 4 but not the worst.
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I don't understand.

The poll cited in the OP says that Obama is the worst.

Now you're saying other polls indicate he's not the worst.

Could you please explain which poll I should believe and why? And how your ironclad method of relying on public opinion could yield inconsistent results?
 
johnny karate said:
I don't understand.

The poll cited in the OP says that Obama is the worst.

Now you're saying other polls indicate he's not the worst.

Could you please explain which poll I should believe and why? And how your ironclad method of relying on public opinion could yield inconsistent results?
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Believe whoever you want. I was asked who I believe is the worst, and I gave my opinion which is based on the polling data I cited.

Regnad Kcin said:
That doesn't answer my question: Who do you think, and why?
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See the above. I'm looking to base my opinion on some sort of metrics. The one I cited is the one I think identifies the best and worst. This back and forth, "well Bush/Obama did this, and that..." is pointless.
 
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Neally said:
Believe whoever you want. I was asked who I believe is the worst, and I gave my opinion which is based on the polling data I cited.
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You have championed the validity of public opinion polls.

Now we have multiple public opinion polls that yield different results on the same topic.

Which one is right and why?
 
Neally said:
I gave it to you along with my reasoning.
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You said you agreed with one group of polls.

You did not give your reasoning for why that group of polls is correct, nor why another that contradicts them is wrong.

How are you able to decide which public opinion polls are correct?
 
tyr_13 said:
If those numbers pan out with the relevant other numbers. Apart from what others have pointed out about fairly high approval ratings, to get a sense of who people actually think is the worst President since WWII, you'd have to have surveys that asked this same question during each of their presidencies to compare to each other. I'm all but certain that each and every president would have 'won' the 'worst president' title in the middle of or towards the end of their runs because their opposition will be united against them at that point while their allies will split their vote. The next president will be rated the worst then. Then the one after that. So you'd have to actually compare numbers longitudinally.
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This is a very good point. Fortunately, Quinnipiac actually ran a head-to-head poll between Bush and Obama, which is probably the fairest measure of relative popularity between Obama and another president. Bush was considered the better president by 40%, Obama was considered better by 39%, and the rest thought they were about the same or expressed no opinion.

Was Obama at a disadvantage because he's still President? Probably. Of course, he has almost always had the media wind at his back, and Bush has had the media wind in his face. Interestingly, independents broke against Obama pretty strongly, 41% to 31%, but there were more Democrats in the sample than Republicans (31%-26%), and Republicans were slightly more supportive of Obama than Democrats were of Bush (7% to 4%).

Besides that, there would of course be the facts of history such as the actual effects the actual actions of the president will have. Presidents get blamed and credited for an entire host of things that aren't in their control. There is no way the layman is going to be able to make that judgement. On that level, the basic question is deeply flawed. The idea that who the general populace believes is the worst president, and who is actually the worst president would line up is pretty laughable. Even experts would have a tough time making that call.
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The usual experts called on to judge presidents are historians, who in my experience are a pretty biased lot (liberally so). I would rather read their comparative analyses rather than just the rankings they assign. Here's one by Peggy Noonan, which I think makes a persuasive case that Obama is at least an anomaly (and probably not a good one).
 
johnny karate said:
You said you agreed with one group of polls.

You did not give your reasoning for why that group of polls is correct, nor why another that contradicts them is wrong.

How are you able to decide which public opinion polls are correct?
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I'm not going to keep repeating it since you either don't read or forget what I've posted in #102 & #109.
 
Didn't people have a lower opinion of Clinton when he was still president, compared to Obama today? My memory on this isn't so good.
 
kookbreaker said:
Do you really want to go there? Last time we brought up a thread from 2008 it was some folks praising Sarah Palin to the rafters because she was obviously such a great politician.
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Actually, the recent bumping of that thread was one of the things which prompted me to post the link to AUP's 2008 thread.

Just as it's a good idea in relation to 'psychics' who spout off predictions to look back regularly at what they said in years past and see how well it holds up, so I think it's a good idea in relation to those of us who spout off on politics to look back regularly and see how well it holds up.

(I am often amazed that many professional pundits whose track records rival those of professional psychics are still regularly featured in broadcast and print media.)

When a story is current, it's often hard to tell whose analyses of the events are good and whose aren't. Several years later, after things have settled out, we often can see better who was speaking sense and who was speaking nonsense.

A lot of the comments made in 2008 praising Sarah Palin extravagantly do not hold up well today. In contrast, I think AUP and the other posters in that thread come off reasonably well.

Much of the thread got side-tracked into discussion of who to blame for the housing loan crisis -- a subject which is still muddy. But I thought the discussion of what Obama would be facing (if he won), what he might be able to accomplish, and how he would be viewed was reasonably intelligent.

(Of course, the main reason I couldn't resist mentioning that thread here, is that AUP's thread title ties in so perfectly with this one -- even though the topics of discussion in that thread are significantly different from the topics of discussion in this one.)
 
Neally said:
I'm not going to keep repeating it since you either don't read or forget what I've posted in #102 & #109.
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Here are both those posts in their entirety:
Neally said:
Yes. I'm not all that confident with the appeal to authority angle particularly with a subjective thing like "place in history" from a small number of biased academics. I'd look for something along the lines some sort of comprehensive number that would take into account the job approval rating over the term and other objective economic numbers that could be directly attributable to presidential directives, if any.
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Neally said:
In other words, incorporating public opinion into the rating, just like I said.

In other words, using public opinion to determine the ranking. I though you were against Argumentu ad populum and that there were other "facts" outside of public opinion that should be used. Below you mention some sort of objective measurments which I agree with, but it sounds like you also want to include job approval ratings.

BTW, I agree that surveying who people think was the worst is not an approach that should be used.

Which is also essentially what I said.
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Please highlight the part that explains how you are able to determine which public opinion polls are correct when they yield different results.
 
johnny karate said:
... one random popularity poll has absolutely no bearing on Obama's place in history.
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Yes, I agree with you completely.

I think you may have misunderstood my post, which surprises me a little if you actually read my post so I think you likely just skimmed it. The point of my post was to point to a 6-year old thread which (tangentially) related to the topic of this thread and which I thought readers of this thread might find interesting.

My framing that AUP had made a prediction which came true was intended as humorous. What AUP said was that the US (in 2008) appeared to be in a similar situation to what Australia had faced recently, and he thought it likely the outcome would also likely be similar. That's a sensible point, even though things didn't work out as similarly as I think he expected.

I thought I had made my humorous intent clear, but obviously not. A jokes not funny if one to explain it, but I'll explain anyway.

Nova Land said:
On October 24, 2008, a_unique_person posted this prediction: Obama will go down in history as being a worse President than Carter

Darat closed the thread (likely after being directed to do so from JREF higher-ups who were aware that a poll would come out in 2014 confirming this prediction) but I thought folks reading this new thread might be interested in re-reading that thread now.
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I could imagine people taking the part in red seriously if this were the John Edward Educational Foundation or the Sylvia Browne Society. But this is JREF and I assumed most regular posters here knew better.

The reason Darat closed the thread is that it was part of a special 2008 Elections sub-section of the Politics forum. With the 2008 elections over, Darat closed the sub-section and all the threads in it. (After all, who could have predicted that people would still be interested in discussing the 2008 election after it was over?) It had nothing to do with AUP having made some super-prediction (which, as the quoted AUP post showed, he hadn't, despite my framing it as such). And my insinuation that JREF employs psychics who can accurately predict events 6 years in advance is obvious nonsense.

I assumed everyone here would be familiar with Pehata's Limit, which establishes it's impossible to make reliably-accurate psychic predictions more than 5 years in advance. Evidently not. Next time I'll know better and stick to serious posting.
 
Gawdzilla said:
Okay, so nobody got the joke in the subject line? "Since WWII" means "since FDR". Gotta love it.
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I suppose that's only amusing to people who think FDR wasn't a terrible president.

Woodrow Wilson was probably even worse, and in some respects FDR really was the horrible sequel to Wilson. So, interestingly, WWII is an appropriate alias for FDR.
 
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