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Douglas_Knight comments on Open Thread, January 11-17, 2016 - Less Wrong Discussion
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What are you trying to explain? Why do you believe that Obama did anything wrong?
Are you trying to explain his approval ratings? Shouldn't ~50% approval be your default assumption of political polarization? If so, there is nothing to explain. Are they very different from other presidents? A little lower, but nothing out of the ordinary. W's peak approval was just after 9/11. Clinton's peak approval was during the impeachment. Clinton's rose over the course of his term, while W's and Obama's fell. I guess you could interpret that as judging their actions, but W's ended low and Obama's ended mediocre.
Added: better than the summary statistics in wikipedia are these graphs (correcting the dead link in wikipedia). Obama had a two year honeymoon period and has bounced around 50/50 since then.
Anger from the political right. Though it's generally what I would expect given the nature of politics, I want to understand if there is an objective basis for opposition to Obama...or if it is just pure blue vs. green stuff.
I have a sense race plays a big part of the right's hatred of him, but I'm not sure how to go about validating this.
My link also gives peak disapproval ratings. Obama is perfectly normal. W is an outlier, with a peak disapproval of 71%. Other than him, all the presidents since Ford had a peak disapproval of 54-60%. (Ford didn't have time to do anything to merit disapproval.) Obama is exactly in the middle. (Average disapproval is probably a better metric, though.)
Anecdotally, a lot of the anger came from him pardoning Nixon.
Sure, his ratings (archive) crashed from 71/3 on inauguration to 50/28 after the pardon, but that just took him to a fairly normal level.
Interesting. Good info. Thank you.
I don't see any unusual anger.
It's election year, so the usual suspects are already hard at work operating their mud-throwers at max volume and intensity...
What in politics would you consider to be an "objective basis"?
I'm not sure. Perhaps there is very little that can be considered objective, since the two parties have competing definitions of success.
Are you saying there are is no objective way to evaluate a president's performance? Which measures did you use to conclude the following?
Evaluating performance necessarily involves specifying goals and metrics.
If you provide hard definitions of the goals that you're interested in, as well as precise specifications of the metrics, plus a particular weighting scheme for combining performance numbers for multiple goals, well, then you can claim that you are objectively evaluating the performance. The problem is that you're evaluating a very narrow idea of performance, one that involves the goals and the metrics and the weights that you have picked. Other people can (and probably will) say that your goals are irrelevant, your metrics are misleading, and your weights are biased X-)
I listened to my feelings :-P