May 26, 2005

Is Bush a Failure? Or Do Historians Just Hate Him?

Jim Lindgren has this post up on Volokh's site that criticizes an informal survey of historians that asserts that the Bush presidency is a failure. Now, ranking the general "success" of presidents is, to me, so pointless an exercise that it's better fit for some mid-afternoon talk show on VH1, or maybe an old Docker's commercial, than for supposedly scientific measurement. There are specific measures you can look at for certain types of ratings - so why not just hit the reference section of your local library? And of course ranking the success of a president who's still in office seems close to moronic. But since Lindgren and folks like him apparently want to write books on this kind of thing, well, I'm willing to play for a moment and consider his argument. What he seems to be arguing here is that Bush is rated a failure because the sample that was polled was skewed (the people who hang out in archives and actually read a plethora of White House memos are apparently not that friendly to the GOP). But his solution (add more conservative Republicans to the mix) doesn't seem to get at the real problem here. The real problem isn't a matter of the sample, it's that "success" can mean many things. So here's a notion for you - precisely specify your dependent variable! Do that, and you should remove a good deal of the error that might come from the experts you use looking at things through a partisan lens.

Posted by armand at May 26, 2005 01:32 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Politics


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