Trust Me: We All Liked President Carter Then Too But …

… But, given his defeat in the 1980 presidential election after serving only one term, it is easy to forget that even while serving as president he was held in relatively high esteem by the public for his personal qualities. … The lesson, as I discussed in a previous post […] Read more »

Why This Scandal Won’t Hurt Hillary

… The Hillary Clinton e-mail controversy is just the latest entrée in a decades-long, calorie-rich menu provided by the former first lady and her husband. But will it make a difference in 2016? Scandal allegations are almost always an enormously time-consuming distraction and they make it virtually impossible to communicate […] Read more »

The Worst President Since World War II?

Is Barack Obama really the worst president since World War II? The Quinnipiac Poll announced just that result result recently. There were thereafter a number of pushbacks from that conclusion, most based on the fact that such an open-end question reflects a “recency bias” in that Americans think about the […] Read more »

Is Obama the Worst Modern President? Take Two

Conservative pundits such as the Wall St. Journal’s Peggy Noonan continue to cite the recent Quinnipiac poll as evidence that Obama is perhaps the worst president to have served during the last seven decades. For reasons I discussed in my previous post, however, I think we need to resist jumping […] Read more »

Will Obama Ever Be Popular Again?

Barack Obama has had an unusual presidency, winning election twice with a majority of the vote, yet frequently saddled with a job approval rating below 50 percent. In fact, only during his “honeymoon” period in 2009 and around his reelection in 2012 has a majority of the population approved of […] Read more »