December 6, 2010

Ranking the Presidents

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The Gallup poll below is being touted as a “ranking” of modern presidents, and it puts John F. Kennedy at the top. (I guess Eisenhower doesn’t count as “modern.”) This is obviously crazy, but when I clicked the link I discovered that it wasn’t really a ranking of who was the best president, it was a ranking of retrospective job approval ratings:

That’s not quite so crazy. It’s probably still wrong, but not crazy. Kennedy did some popular things, handled the White House with style, and was assassinated before his administration had time to become widely loathed, which it likely would have been had he stayed in office for a full eight years. He never really had a chance to outlast his honeymoon, and LBJ ended up taking the hit for Vietnam and 60s unrest more generally.

In any case, the innate good sense of the American public is shown by George W. Bush’s low ranking. I just hope that as time goes by, people remember what a bad president he was. He’s not a president who deserves to benefit from the rosiness of faded memories.

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We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

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Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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