Monday, February 20, 2017

Ranking the Presidents

C-SPAN has just published the 2017 results of their Presidential Historians Survey.

As any good data geek would do, I threw all the data into Excel to see what I could discover. You can download my work here.

I’ve always been interested in these types of studies because, on the one hand they advertise themselves as being totally objective, it’s really hard to squeeze the subjectivity out of them.

After all, any historian — no matter what he claims — brings to the table a certain amount of historical bias. Today’s political climate tends to make that bias even more obvious.

For example, Glen Beck — admittedly nobody’s example of political objectivity — ranks Woodrow Wilson as the most evil man in all of American history. But the survey ranks Wilson a respectable 13th out of 45.

And James Polk — not on the general public’s list of great American Presidents — ranks number 16 — proof that the C-SPAN academic advisors sure know their pre-Civil War history.

To produce the rankings, C-SPAN asked a team from academia to rank all presidents using ten “qualities of presidential leadership”:
  • Public Persuasion
  • Crisis Leadership
  • Economic Management
  • Moral Authority
  • International Relations
  • Administrative Skills
  • Relations with Congress
  • Vision/Setting An Agenda
  • Pursued Equal Justice for All
  • Performance Within the Context of His Times

It’s probably a good idea that such a panel is used and that they don’t ask me or Glen Beck to serve on that panel.

All those categories gave me plenty of data to load into Excel. Let’s see what I discovered.

I thought it would be interesting to measure the presidents on a combination of rank and “consistency”. I measured consistency based on the rank of the standard deviation of the rank in for that president in all the categories.

A consistent president is one who ranks the same in all categories. A president may be consistently good, consistently bad, or consistently mediocre. Is there anything to learn from this?

Here is a scatter plot of the results:


To validate the data, let’s look at a couple of corners. Yep, not only does Abraham Lincoln rank as the number one president, he ranks as the most consistent president. That places him in the lower left corner. A good president all around.

In the other corner are both Lincoln’s predecessor and his successor. Wow. We always knew that James Buchannan did more to cause the Civil War than any other individual. And we know that Andrew Johnson did more to screw up Reconstruction than just about anybody else. Bad presidents all around. Thanks for the legacy, guys.

Here’s another way of looking at things:


This graph color codes the presidents by their rank in each of the ten categories. Since they are ordered by the final score, any place you see “islands” of a different color, that’s an anomaly that’s worthy of discussion.

For example, Lyndon Johnson was a pretty decent president. He ranks at the top for “Relations with Congress” (he had to fight his own Democratic Party to get the Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed; a greater percentage of Republicans voted for the bill than did Democrats). But he rightfully ranks near the bottom for international relations for getting us deeper in the Vietnam war.

Bill Clinton ranks a decent number 15 overall, but comes in near the bottom in for “Moral Authority” because of his fondness for oral activities.

It’s a little harder for me to explain the person that I believe to be the nicest, worst president of them all: Jimmy Carter. A dreadful president who ruined both the American economy and our relations with Iran, I don’t know how he ranked as high as number 26. On the other hand, he’s a decent man in a strong, loving marriage, a Baptist deacon and Sunday School teacher, and a Habitat for Humanity volunteer into his 90s; doesn’t he deserve to be ranked higher than number 14 in “Moral Authority”?

And how did Barack Obama perform in his debut appearance? He came in at number 12, between Woodrow Wilson and James Monroe. That’s probably fair.

He ranked near the bottom in “Relations with Congress”. The only way he got ObamaCare passed was with back-door deals and a “gotta-pass-the-bill-before-you-read-it” mentality, even though his party controlled both houses of Congress at the time.

He also scored pretty low on “International Relations” by touring the world while apologizing for America’s past policies, weakened our position with Russia, and managed to worsen our relationship on both sides of the Middle East — quite an accomplishment!

He scored the highest in the category “Pursued Equal Justice for All”. That sounds about right for somebody who thinks “it’s good for everybody” to “spread the wealth around”.

We’ll have to wait a few years to see what historians think of our Mogul-in-Chief. My guess is his drain-the-swamp and build-the-wall dreams will score high in the “Vision/Setting an Agenda” category.

Fortunately for Mr. Trump, there is no category for “Relationship with the Press”.

Friday, February 17, 2017

On Being a Grammar Nazi

I’ve been conflicted lately over whether I want the reputation of being a Grammar Nazi. There’s no doubt that I am one; I’m just not sure if I want that out there for everybody to see.

I’ve been especially troubled lately over the tendency of people to say “one of the only”.

“He’s one of the only people who can understand this policy.”

“Mary is one of the only people in the office that can program in COBOL.”

Ambiguity is a very bad thing. How many people in the office can program in COBOL? Three? Then Mary is one of the few. But is there really only one? Then Mary is the only one, not one of the only ones.

So I arrogantly proclaimed my Nazi-ness to the world, eager to rid it of this literary travesty.

Until I read on the Google-nets that it’s actually okay to say “one of the only”.

Rats.

My career as a Grammar Nazi can be traced to a 1977 episode of All in the Family. In “Michael and Gloria Split”, Archie tells Michael that he will “loan” him some money. Michael corrects him, saying he had to “lend” him money because “loan” is a noun and “lend” is a verb.

Yea for Meathead, I thought. Archie is just sooo uneducated! (Archie was not impressed. Our grammatical skills are so underappreciated.)

That is, until I discovered that Merriam-Webster — and who can argue with them? — says that “loan” has been a verb for 700 years — and still is.

The famous dictionary site has been wrong before. In my opinion, they completely missed the mark with the whole “try and” vs. “try to” argument.

On the other hand, they totally understand the concept of the extended meaning of the word “Nazi”. (You have no right to be offended if I use the word to describe myself.)

Being a Grammar Nazi is bad enough. Being a Closet Grammar Nazi is a fate I have chosen for myself, to avoid the slings and arrows of outrageous ostracism.

I think I need somebody to pat me on the head and say “there”, “their”, and “they’re”.

Monday, February 06, 2017

Citizen-in-Chief

Bill O’Reilly’s Super Bowl interview with Donald Trump gave us the famous quote: “There are a lot of killers. You think our country is so innocent?” Everybody’s talking about it.

So many people are talking about it, I have nothing further to say about it.

Instead, I’m going to analyze an exchange near the end of the interview.

Attempting to humanize the President, O’Reilly asked: “Do you ever say to yourself, ‘I can’t believe I’m here’?”

The President gave a typical Trump-esque ramble:
“The other day, I walked into the main entrance of the White House, and I said to myself, this is sort of amazing. Or you walk into Air Force One, it’s like a surreal experience in a certain way. But you have to get over it because there’s so much work to be done, whether it’s jobs or other nations that truly hate us; you have to get over it.”

I think he missed the chance to make a good point so I guess I’ll have to make it for him.

Much has been made of the fact that Donald Trump is our first President with neither previous political or military experience. Heck, most of our presidents had an abundance of both.

The fact that can even happen is a testament to the genius of our representative form of government.

In many countries, the head of state is actually required to be a member of Parliament, because the office is elected from their ranks.

In other countries, you have to be a member of a particular family or blood line to be King.

And in still others, the General of the victorious army becomes the de facto leader.

But in America, we can actually elect a Citizen-in-Chief. And that’s exactly what we’ve done this time. It’s amazing that it took us this long.

George Washington literally came out of retirement to become President. And he immediately returned to retirement at the end of his service. His concept of a perfect country was a party-less system run by a citizen administration.

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams screwed that up. They started a string of professional politicians in the form of diplomats, governors, senators, and congressmen to become President. Even in their private life, more than half of our presidents have been lawyers. Very few were successful businessmen (both Bushes, Carter, and Truman). One was even an actor.

Maybe this is the start of a trend. Maybe it’s a good idea to let our lawmakers be professional lawmakers, but demand our Presidents be professional administrators. Maybe that’s the kind of division in power the Founding Fathers had in mind.

So if I had been the President, and O’Reilly had asked me “Can you believe it?”, my response would have been:
“Bill, it’s an honor to be here. I am humbled that the voters of this great country put their trust in me. But yeah, I can believe it. Because this is what is meant to be. It’s the very nature of a Republic. The citizens hiring a fellow citizen to go to Washington and make sure that the government is administered in a fair and equitable way and that laws are enforced and that their money is well-spent. That’s what this office is about; and that’s why I’m here.”

Maybe some day Donald will hire me as his speech writer.