Nobody achieves their objectives. The Republicans were in control of the US for 8 years and didn't achieve their objectives. What percentage of US Presidents "achieved their objectives"? Less than 7%, I'll bet.

GWB was tremendously successful in achieving stated objectives. Lowering taxes, passing PATRIOT, No Child Left Behind, invading Iraq, invading Afghanistan, the surge, the Medicare private insurance revamp, blocking stem cells, and even more than that. There were, what, 3 noteable failures? (Privatizing Social Security, Clear Skies, and immigration.) That these policies were all miserably ruinous in the real world doesn't matter. A lot of his programs went through. 7%? Not hardly! You've just pulled that assertion out of your arse.

"...one useful measure is to see if Bush met his own goals. We would argue he largely did during his first term, and this is made more impressive because American presidents are institutionally weak, especially in domestic affairs, and because the manner of this election provided very little political capital to bolster his prospects."

If we really believed that <7% of presidents achieved their goals, then that implies less than 3 US presidents were successful, and the other 41 failures. We can obviously count FDR, Lincoln, and Washington as successful (which technically is all we need to disprove x<7%); is it really plausible that no other president achieved their goals? Of course not. Goetz's reading of 'achieving objectives' is absurd. To quote the paper again:

" To construct a hard test for the argument that terrorism is an ineffective means of coercion, I afforded generous conditions to limit the number of policy failures. First, for analytic purposes both a “total success” and a “partial success” are counted as policy successes, while only completely unsuccessful outcomes (“no successes”) are counted as failures. A “limited success” is counted as neither a success nor a failure, even though the terrorist group invariably faces criticism from its natural constituency that the means employed have been ineffective, or even counterproductive. Thus, a policy objective is deemed a success even if the terrorist group was only partially successful in accomplishing it, whereas an objective receives a failing grade only if the group has not made any noticeable progress toward achieving it. Second, an objective is judged successful even if the group accomplished it before 2001, the year the State Department assembled its official list of foreign terrorist organizations. Third, all policy successes are attributed to terrorism as the causal factor, regardless of whether important intervening variables, such as a peace process, may have contributed to the outcome."

The decks are heavily stacked in this analysis in favor of the terrorist groups.