Mediaboss Marketing

Ive been getting emails from bewildered colleagues asking about a survey of presidential scholars that determined that Barack Obama is the 12th best president in the history of the United States, putting him near the top quartile of our presidents. How can this be? I, too, was mystified, especially given that I participated in the survey.

The survey was conducted by the impeccably fair C-SPAN. Few sources do their job like C-SPAN does. If you want truly unfiltered news, C-SPAN is unrivaled for its ability to simply place a camera in a room and let reality speak for itself.

When it comes to surveys of presidents, C-SPAN likewise has no peer. I remember the nauseating presidential surveys in the 1980s and 1990s. They were mere measurements of the liberalism of the academy that is, liberal historians and liberal political scientists expressing their liberalism by their liberal rankings of presidents. It was a farce.

C-SPAN, fortunately, has endeavored to provide a valuable corrective. In 2000, 2009, and 2017, C-SPAN set out to do its own survey and has indeed assembled a more rounded group of scholars. (I was among those surveyed for the 2009 ranking, as well.) To be sure, most (if not the vast majority) of the scholars surveyed are clearly on the left, but there are a decent number of conservatives: By my estimate, over a dozen, possibly as many as 20. Of course, thats still far out of proportion with the population at large, where self-identified conservatives have outnumbered liberals for decades (usually in the range of 35-40 percent self-identified conservatives vs. 20-25 percent self-identified liberals). C-SPAN needs to do better next time around. A field of 10-20 conservatives among 91 participants isnt good, albeit better than the nonsense we used to see in biased surveys.

Likewise befitting C-SPANs fairness, the ranking criteria for the presidents are commendably nonpartisan. The criteria are obviously intended to remove ideology from those doing the judging. Here are the 10 criteria:

For each of the 10 criteria, a president received a scored ranging from one (not effective) to 10 (very effective). Id like readers to pause and look at those criteria carefully. Imagine if you were doing the judging.

Given these criteria again, essentially non-ideological criteria I personally had no choice but to score very highly presidents like FDR and Woodrow Wilson and LBJ, all of whose presidencies I either did not approve of or outright despised or found destructive. But facts are facts: These presidents were extremely effective. No, I personally didnt like how they were effective, but they were effective nonetheless. Did Wilson have an agenda and vision and get it through? Oh, yes. You bet he did. So did FDR and LBJ.

And yet, those same criteria prompted me to rank Washington, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Reagan, and Eisenhower very high. I will not here share exactly how I tallied each, but I will say that those presidents in my top 10 were very similar to those in the overall top 10. Heres the top 10 that C-SPAN compiled:

Following at 11 and 12, respectively, were Woodrow Wilson and Obama. (For the record, I gave Kennedy a decent rating, but to place him in the top 10, and ahead of Reagan, is just plain stupid. Gee, the guy wasnt even president three full years.)

But what about Barack Obama at 12? Ill say this as nicely and professionally as I can: I find this utterly perplexing. Do the exercise yourself. Go through those 10 categories. Ascribe Obama a score of 1 to 10, and do so relative to other presidents youve ranked. Where would you give Obama a 10? How many (if any) scores above a 5 would you give Obama? For that matter, how would you not score Reagan so much higher than Obama? Yes, Reagan finished with an overall ranking of nine, which is better than Obama, but his total composite score wasnt much higher than Obamas.

Seriously, are even liberals that happy with the Obama presidency? Try to remove your ideological lens, whether left or right, and assess these questions:

What did Barack Obama accomplish? What is the Obama legacy? What was the Obama vision/agenda and (more important, since were measuring effectiveness) how successful was he in implementing it? In 2012, at the Democratic National Convention, Obamas promoters could do no better than come up with silly placards about how Obama got Osama and saved GM. Unlike the vast majority of two-term presidents, Obamas re-election numbers were much worse. In fact, Barack Obama was the first president ever re-elected with fewer popular votes, fewer Electoral College votes, a lower percentage and percentage margin of victory, and winning fewer states. He never had a sustained period of high favorability. He couldnt elect a successor to carry on his legacy. To the contrary, Donald Trump plans to repudiate any Obama legacy.

Where is the list of signature domestic achievements by Obama? Obamacare maybe? It was a disaster from the roll-out, and its going to be repealed and replaced.

What were Obamas defining moments of crisis leadership? Wheres his Cuban Missile Crisis? Did he even have a crisis to lead? How about Benghazi as a candidate?

Where was Barack Obamas Camp David? What did he do for the Middle East, for Arab-Israeli relations, for relations with Russia, the EU, NATO, the G-20? Wheres his NAFTA? Wheres his summit with the Russian leadership? Wheres his missile-reduction treaty? Wheres his chemical weapons ban?

As for Obamas economic record, it was colossally bad. My economist colleague Mark Hendrickson calls it a shocking historically weak economic performance, as many others have shown. During the eight years of Barack Obamas presidency, the average annual real GDP growth was 1.5 percent, notes Hendrickson, theweakest economic performance of any post-WWII president, and thefourth worst ever. And to try to still blame that failure on George W. Bush after eight years is ludicrous. Obamas GDP growth in 2016 (eight years after Bush) was a terrible 1.6 percent.

Bushs economy grew better than that, and he inherited a recession and was hit with 9/11 his first year, which devastated the economy. In fact, not only was George W. Bushs economic-growth rate better than Obamas, but so was Jimmy Carters. Yes, Carter typically upheld as the dubious yardstick of economic incompetence actually had more than double Obamas GDP growth (3.3 percent)!

Any deficit reduction under Obama (after he exploded the deficit to unprecedented record highs in the first two years of the Pelosi-Reid Congress) is attributable in large part to the Republican Congress that liberals excoriated for spending cuts (and now want to take responsibility for the subsequent deficit reduction). The Obama debt exploded way worse than the debt under Reagan and George W. Bush.

So, where would you score Obama on economic management? I cant imagine anything beyond a 3.

In what way was Obama a master at public persuasion? What new constituencies did he generate? Where are the Obama Republicans, akin to the Reagan Democrats? How were his relations with Congress? Did you observe stellar administrative skills in Obama? His notorious lack of meetings with his NSC and intelligence and security staffs were breathtaking in their lack of any administration. As I reported here in 2012, Obama attended only 44 percent of his Daily Briefs in the first 1,225 days of his administration. For 2012, he attended a little over a third. This was totally contrary to Bush and other predecessors. Reagan and Ike both had hands-off leadership styles, but at least they attended meetings.

Who gave him a 10 for that category?

And if youre extolling Obamas attempted fundamental transformation of Americas public-school toilets via executive order, or his illuminating the White House in rainbow colors to celebrate the Supreme Courts Obergefell decision, or his suing the Little Sisters of the Poor via the HHS Mandate, sorry, but those are not among the categories for evaluation.

I want to see the case made by the guy or gal who thinks that Barack Obama merits being listed near the top 10 presidents in history. Actually, some must have rated him in the top 5, because I guarantee my score for Obama (low as it was) surely dropped him a few pegs.

In short, Im stunned. Based on the criteria we were given for ranking these presidents, I cannot conceive how Obama could possibly score well. I dont see how Bill Clinton didnt rate higher than Obama.

As noted, there were some conservatives on C-SPANs list. Im wondering if the conservatives didnt send in their surveys. The liberal historians must have gone bonkers in merrily giving Obama the highest scores in every category. But forget about that. This shouldnt be a liberal-conservative thing. Thats the point. Literally half of my top 10 or 12 were Democrats, and Im no Democrat.

Clearly, the liberal scholars were not able to separate their partisanship when it came to objectively judging Obama. Theres no way that Barack Obama should rate the 12th-best president in U.S. history. Not a chance.

Read more:
Rating the Presidents and Obama - American Spectator

An Atlantic magazine article by Washington journalist David Frum frets about a coming autocracy engineered by President Donald Trump, and the amazing thing is that the author did not notice the past eight years.

Its as if Noahs Ark had finally landed and the understood message was that a flood was only now on its way.

Equally bad as Trump is this kind of overwrought despair about him, the round-the-clock crying, the fanatical diatribes, the rioting, the celebrity angst, the intellectual wannabes worrying themselves into paranoia. Yes, Trump is as debased as debased gets for a president of the United States of America. He is ignorant, small-minded, vulgar, insensitive, inarticulate and egotistical, for starters.

But all of this has to be viewed in context, and the context is Hillary Clinton, of course, the main encouragement for multitudes of Trump voters, and also President Barack Obama, the opposite of Trump in sophistication though not in ego. He happened to be unequipped as president to negotiate with his assumed inferiors but prepared to discard democratic principles if they got in his legacys way.

Were not just going to be waiting for legislation, said Obama in 2014 after Republicans captured the Senate on top of controlling the House. Ive got a pen and Ive got a phone, and I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward.

In other words, so much for constitutional checks and balances and on with unflinching power. It wasnt just talk. It was action. Frum, to his credit, does mention Obamas granting legal status to vast numbers of illegal immigrants after saying at least 22 times that he had no authority to do that without congressional approval. He was right. The order is now in court.

Also in court in his order establishing a sweeping Clean Power Plan that would cost Americans a fortune in utility bills, erase scads of jobs and do zip about global warming (as admitted by EPA director Gina McCarthy). It was based on a plain misinterpretation of law and would simply scuttle state laws unconstitutionally (as argued by constitutional expert Laurence Tribe).

There is much, much more along these lines, but consider one of the surest ways of autocratic oppression in these United States, and thats tens of thousands of pages of regulations that aim to micromanage businesses and your life. Guess who holds records on all of this? Obama, of course. The most impressive of these, autocratically speaking, is his 600 major regulations costing a total of $743 billion. You can run but you cant hide.

Frum spends a lot of time on subjects irrelevant to his main topic, such as possible conflicts of interest. He gets downright ridiculous when he apparently thinks Trumps rhetoric is more dangerous to a free press than the Obama administrations spying on The Associated Press and threatening reporters with jail on issues of identifying sources. He goes after Fox TV as entangled in a Trump love affair without acknowledging a widespread media enmity that he himself illustrates.

Frum also cheats statistics by denying a significant crime rise in Americas biggest cities in Obamas last years in office, seeing this claim as a political trick by Trump to divide and conquer. The numbers are as undeniable as the blood in the streets, and the writers excuse of crime being a lot lower than in the 1990s is like shrugging your shoulders at the 2008 recession because the Great Depression was worse.

Beyond Frum, there is the Muslim ban that was not a Muslim ban. There were the immigration raids that were no different from similar raids under Obama. There were Trumps court criticisms that did not come close to Obamas 2010 State of the Union assault on Supreme Court justices sitting right in front of him.

How To Build An Autocracy is the headline of the Frum piece. Obama gave us some very good lessons.

Jay Ambrose is an op-ed columnist for Tribune News Service. Readers may email him at speaktojay@aol.com.

See the rest here:
Jay Ambrose: Autocracy? Obama wrote the playbook - La Crosse Tribune

The Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago could require a $1.5 billion endowment, its architects say, three times what was raised for the George W. Bush Presidential Center in Dallas.

Husband-and-wife architectural team Tod Williams and Billie Tsien noted that it will be difficult to raise such a huge sum because Obama scrupulously declined to do much fund-raising while he was still in office.

The Obama Center is due to be so expensive because it will require the construction of both a presidential library and a museum about the lives of Barack and Michelle Obama. And federal requirements now stipulate that former presidents must have larger endowments to pay for annual operating costs at the libraries.

It wont be easy, Williams said. Its not just about preserving the past. Its about the future.

The actual buildings were slated to cost $200 million. But I told them it will cost $300 million, Williams said.

Williams and Tsien spoke about the project with architectural critic Paul Goldberger on Wednesday, at the annual benefit for East Hamptons LongHouse Reserve.

The event was held in the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center, which the duo designed theyve also designed the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the Phoenix Art Museum and the Logan Center for the Arts in Chicago.

Listening in rapt attention were LongHouse founder Jack Larsen, its president, Dianne Benson, and stem-cell guru Dr. Christopher Calapai.

Read more from the original source:
Barack Obama's presidential library may need $1.5 billion - Page Six

Chris Wallace sparred with White House Chief of StaffReince Priebuson Sunday over President Donald Trumps attacks on the media.

The Fox News Sunday host said the president crosses a line when he describes the media as the enemy of the American people, referencing a tweet Trump sent last week.

Heres the problem, Wallace said. When the president says that were the enemy of the American people, it makes it sound like if youre going against him, youre going against the country.

Priebus defended Trumps attacks, and continued criticizing the medias coverage of the new administration.

Heres the problem, Chris, Priebus said. You get about 10 percent [media] coverage on the fact you had a very successful meeting with Bibi Netanyahu, the prime minister of the UK, the prime minister of Canada ...but as soon as it was over, the next 20 hours is all about Russian spies, how no one gets along, how nothings happening. Give me a break.

But you dont get to tell us what to do, Reince, Wallace shot back. You dont get to tell us what to do any more than Barack Obama did.Barack Obama whined about Fox News all the time. But I gotta say, he never said that we were an enemy of the people.

Wallace isnt the only Fox News anchor to call out Trump for his treatment of the press.Last week, Shep Smith harshly criticized the president for undermining the media and failing to answer reporters questions during a lengthy press conference.

Your opposition was hacked and the Russians were responsible for it, and your people were on the phone with Russia on the same day its happening, and were fools for asking the questions? Smith said. No, sir, were not fools for asking the questions, and we demand to know the answer to this question. You owe this to the American people.

Read the original here:
Chris Wallace: Obama Didn't Like The Media, 'But He Never Said We Were An Enemy' - Huffington Post

On February 17, Publishers Weekly reported that former President Barack Obama and his attorney are shopping a memoir among the Big Five trade publishers in New York. The price is expected to be high for one unusual reason, unusual at least for a political figure.

Explained the New York Times Gardiner Harris in September 2016, Mr. Obamas writing ability could make his memoir not only profitable in its first years but perhaps for decades to come. Harris speculated, in fact, that given Obamas literary skills, his newest book would perhaps rival the memoir of Ulysses S. Grant for durability.

Then again, it may not. In the months since the deal was first bruited about, publishers have had sufficient time to evaluate the evidence for Obamas literary genius. In truth, there is not much to evaluate. Before his acclaimed 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama had only two named articles in print. Publishers who choose to read these articles might well have second thoughts about investing in Obama the writer at any price.

The earliest of the two is an 1,800-word article titled Breaking the War Mentality published in Columbias weekly news magazine, Sundial, at the height of the KGB-generated anti-nuke craze in 1983. The second is an article titled Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City that originally appeared in the 1988 edition of a publication called Illinois Issues.

Obama was 21, at the time he wrote Breaking and on the verge of graduating from an Ivy League university. Had he been raised by wolves in an Indonesian cave and then unleashed on the Columbia campus a year earlier, the reader might cut him slack for such a low-C effort. In fact, though, he was completing his fourth year of college after spending eight years at Hawaiis best prep school. His formal training as a writer culminated in this essay. If Obama worked at improving his skills after this essay, his next published effort, Why Organize, does not reflect it.

The following exercise may seem a bit pedantic, but it will help the reader see the literary capabilities of the young Obama. The problems cited like the five sentences in which the noun and verb do not agree suggest that Obama was far from gifted, very far.

The more sensitive among us struggle to extrapolate experiences of war from our everyday experience, discussing the latest mortality statistics from Guatemala, sensitizing ourselves to our parents wartime memories, or incorporating into our framework of reality as depicted by a Mailer or a Coppola.

This is your classic dangling participle: the words discussing, sensitizing, and incorporating modify the subject, the more sensitive among us, but three other nouns stand between the participles and the subject. Also, note that incorporating should have an object. It makes no sense as is.

But the taste of war the sounds and chill, the dead bodies are remote and far removed.

The subject here is taste. The predicate should be is not are.

We know that wars have occurred, will occur, are occurring, but bringing such experience down into our hearts, and taking continual, tangible steps to prevent war, becomes a difficult task.

Another problem with noun-verb agreement. This time the subject of the but clause is plural bringing and taking. The verb should be become although can be would make more sense. The last two commas, both inappropriate, may have confused Obama.

These groups, visualizing the possibilities of destruction and grasping the tendencies of distorted national priorities, are throwing their weight into shifting America off the dead-end track.

Here, the participle is placed appropriately, but at sentences end Obama throws three awkward metaphors, all clichs, into a nearly indecipherable mix. Also, how does one grasp a tendency?

Along with the community Volunteer Service Center, ARA has been Dons primary concern, coordinating various working groups of faculty, students, and staff members, while simultaneously seeking the ever elusive funding for programs.

Coordinating is another participle left to dangle.

One wonders whether this upsurge stems from young peoples penchant for the latest happenings or from growing awareness of the consequences of nuclear holocaust.

This whole sentence clunks. Upsurge is the wrong word. Happenings should be singular, but even then it sounds like something Mike Brady would have said to Greg or Marcia.

Generally, the narrow focus of the Freeze movement as well as academic discussions of first versus second strike capabilities, suit the military-industrial interests, as they continue adding to their billion dollar erector sets.

The subject is focus, but it is isolated from its predicate by a needless comma, and that predicate should be suits, in any case. Erector sets is another cringe-inducing metaphor.

The very real advantages of concentrating on a single issue is leading the National Freeze movement to challenge individual missile systems, while continuing the broader campaign.

Here is still another problem with agreement. This should read, advantages are leading, but only if advantages could lead. The last phrase dangles.

ARA encourages members to join buses to Washington and participate in a March 7-8 rally intended to push through the Freeze resolution which is making its second trip through the House.

Join buses? This sounds like something you would hear in an ESL class. A rally cannot push a resolution through the House. Now on its second trip?

An entirely student-run organization, SAM casts a wider net than ARA, though for the purposes of effectiveness, they have tried to lock in on one issue at a time.

Organization is singular, and thus they has no antecedent. The wider net clich is lazy.

By organizing and educating the Columbia community, such activities lay the foundation for future mobilization against the relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country.

People organize and educate, not activities.

The belief that moribund institutions, rather than individuals are at the root of the problem, keep SAMs energies alive.

Again, an agreement issue: This should read, The belief . . . keeps SAMs energies alive. The random use of commas throws everything off. Plus, the word choice sucks all logic out of the sentence. In the previous paragraph, Obama warns his readers about the the relentless, often silent spread of militarism in the country. In this paragraph, the reader is told that these same military institutions are moribund that is nearly dead. How their debilitated state keeps the energies of the Students Against Militarism (SAM) alive is not exactly clear.

Regarding Columbias possible compliance, one comment in particular hit upon an important point with the Solomon bill.

The subject of hit upon, not an apt verb to begin with, should have been a person not a comment.

What members of ARA and SAM try to do is infuse what they have learned about the current situation, bring the words of that formidable roster on the face of Butler Library, names like Thoreau, Jefferson, and Whitman, to bear on the twisted logic of which we are today a part.

Infuse is the wrong word. One infuses something into something else. There should be an and after situation, not a comma. Obama utterly mangles the bring to bear phrase. It should read something like, bring the words of those formidable men on the face of the Butler Library Thoreau, Jefferson, Whitman to bear. As to how or whether we are part of a twisted logic, that is best left to the readers imagination.

After the Sundial article, Obama had nothing in print for another five years. Obama biographer David Remnick reports that Obama took a stab at a short story or two, but Remnick shares no samples. In Dreams, Obama cops to only the occasional journal entry during this period. Not surprisingly, when Obama makes his next serious literary effort five years later, many of the problems on display in Breaking manage to find their way into Why Organize.

Facing these realities, at least three major strands of earlier movements are apparent.

Facing these realities modifies nothing. Strands do not face reality.

The election of Harold Washington in Chicago or of Richard Hatcher in Gary were not enough to bring jobs to inner-city neighborhoods.

Of course, it should read, The election was.

neither new nor well-established companies will be willing to base themselves in the inner city and still compete in the international marketplace.

The grammar is passable here. The logic is not. Obama means, I think, Companies willing to base themselves in the inner city, new or established, will not be able to compete in the international marketplace.

Moreover, such approaches can and have become thinly veiled excuses for cutting back on social programs, which are anathema to a conservative agenda.

Agendas do not have anathemas.

But organizing the black community faces enormous problems as well and the urban landscape is littered with the skeletons of previous efforts.

Organizing does not face. Efforts do not leave skeletons.

Obama wrote this essay in 1988, perhaps to pad his rsum for Harvard Law at which he would enroll that same year. It shows a modest improvement over his Columbia essay from five years earlier. This may simply be due to more vigilant editing. That said, the essay exhibits many of the same problems as in Breaking awkward sentence structure, inappropriate word choice, a weakness for clichs, the continued failure to get verbs and nouns to agree. More troubling for the Obama faithful, this essay shows not a hint of the grace and sophistication of his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father.

Two years later, this same writer would be elected president of the Harvard Law Review. At Harvard, Obama had nothing in print under his own name save for a letter defending affirmative action in the November 1990 Harvard Law Record, an independent Law School newspaper. In the very first sentence Obama leads with his signature failing: his inability to make subject and predicate agree. Since the merits of the Law Reviews selection policy has been the subject of commentary for the last three issues, wrote Obama, Id like to take the time to clarify exactly how our selection process works.

A year or so after publishing this letter, Obama landed a book deal that would culminate in what Joe Klein of Time has called the best-written memoir ever produced by an American politician. Only in Obamas uniquely myopic slice of America could a writer of such modest talent achieve so much and expect to achieve so much more.

Excerpt from:
Has Obama's Would-Be Publisher Read 'Breaking the War Mentality'? - American Spectator