USA Today has a real cool map showing the rise and fall of presidential popularity (mostly the fall) since 1945. You can plot the map all sorts of different ways to see the data from various perspectives. Having just played with it for a bit, here are some glum insights:
1. Presidents mostly end less popular than they begin unless they're Reagan or Bill Clinton.
2. Republicans and Bill Clinton are more popular at the beginning of their 2nd term than their first (but it often doesn't last). Democrats, not. (Except Bill Clinton).
3. There doesn't seem to be any correlation between popularity and historical significance (who'd have thunk).
4. The presidents with the stablest popularity (a relative term, mind you) were either mediocre with fine economies (Eisenhower, Clinton), or Reagan (who also has a reasonable economy most of the time, come to think of it, but wasn't mediocre).
5. The most popular president ever (since 1945) was Bush 2, after 9/11. He then plumetted, but contrary to accepted wisdom, he never got quite as low as Nixon. And Truman went lower even than that, if you believe it. Remember him? He's the annonymous one who stepped into FDR's gigantic shoes, set up the postwar world order, set the rules for the Cold War that eventually brought victory, and fired McArthur.
(via Contentions)
Truman also decided pro Israel ...
ReplyDelete- not too long ago his daughter Mrgaret died and there were a number of anecdotes in the net - he must have been a really decent guy with a lot of shrewd common sense
(as to the Atomic Bomb - I remember seeing in the news before the movie that American celebrities were proud to go into the desert and watch unprotected from a ditch - If they didn't want to believe how terrible the thing was or even in the 50s genuinely still didn't know they risked their health to make the point)
Eisenhower was our last grownup President. He wasn't mediocre, he just did the job without fussing.
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