Overall, I think Biden will be remembered as being on par with Jimmy Carter. He’s had a good domestic policy, and if that were all we were ranking on, he would easily be in the top 10, but his foreign policy has been a continuation of Trump’s failed policies.

I generally agree with most of the Siena poll’s findings from this year regarding presidents’ rankings, but I think some presidents have been significantly underrated or overrated.

LBJ is underrated, though still rated well. His domestic policy was the best we have ever had and his economic policy was very successful. His foreign policy gets him dinged regularly, but we know now from Ukraine the consequences of not defending our allies, which should lead Americans to reevaluate the Vietnam War. War is always hell, but we must look at the bigger picture. He is underrated.

John Quincy Adams is an underrated president. He was the first president to push for public universities and other programs we take for granted today. He opposed slavery and was a good man. He was a great president but is usually rated as average.

Harding was not a bad president; he pushed for civil rights unsuccessfully and was definitely not on par with Millard Fillmore. I think his ranking is the most inaccurate.

Benjamin Harrison was an early president who pushed for civil rights, albeit unsuccessfully. Comparing him to George W. Bush is silly.

Theodore Roosevelt was a good president, but it’s hard for me to argue that he was better than LBJ or Obama. He was still a great president, but I rank him at number 14 instead of number 4. His foreign policy was atrocious. The competition is rough. He was not our fourth greatest president, though he was still one of the good ones.

Zachary Taylor was an average president. It’s unfair to put him next to Mallard Fillmore. Rankings in that tier are reserved for presidents pushing our country backward. Taylor was just average.

Chester Alan Arthur was not a bad president. He vetoed the Chinese Exclusion Act and signed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act. It’s inaccurate to put him on par with Bush and Nixon.

Clinton was not a good president. He was average. He deregulated Wall Street and set up the modern Ukraine conflict, but he also did some good things, such as the Violence Against Women Act. Not great, but not terrible.

Wilson was an average president, not in the top 20 for reasons which many people put him as. He would be ranked lower if we didn’t have so many truly awful presidents.

Andrew Jackson is severely overrated and should not be on our money. He was a genocidal, drunk, maniacal slaver obsessed with dueling who committed genocide and ruined our economy.

I do not know why Reagan is rated so highly. The economy performed terribly during his first term, with the highest unemployment in the last half of the 20th century, and his foreign policy was trash. On social policy, he allowed AIDS to spread because he was homophobic. Reagan was trash.

George Walker Bush was the worst president in history. His foreign policy was a disaster; instead of focusing on rooting out the Taliban and building Afghanistan to be a safe society, he invaded Iraq. A homophobic forced birther. He led our economy into a great recession. His Supreme Court picks abolished abortion. A Jesus freak with no respect for our Constitution. He implemented visas on our allies as he coddled state sponsors of terrorism. He did not push hard enough for Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO, directly causing two wars. He is white trash who belongs in the Hague for his war crimes and, in my opinion, was the worst President in our nation’s history.

It is unfair to rank Garfield and William Henry Harrison because they didn’t serve for a full year. So, I do not rank them.

Here is my ranking compared to APSA:

President/winner of all Electoral in row	Order	My ranking	APSA 2024	Difference
Lyndon Baines Johnson	36	1	9	8
George Washington	1	2	3	1
Abraham Lincoln	16	3	1	-2
Franklin Delano Roosevelt	32	4	2	-2
John Fitzgerald Kennedy	35	5	10	5
Barack Hussein Obama	44	6	7	1
Thomas Jefferson	3	10	5	-5
John Quincy Adams	6	7	20	13
Dwight David Eisenhower	34	8	8	0
Harry S. Truman	33	9	6	-3
Warren Gamaliel Harding	29	11	40	29
Benjamin Harrison	23	12	31	19
Ulysses Simpson Grant	18	13	17	4
Theodore Roosevelt	26	14	4	-10
William McKinley	25	15	24	9
James Earl “Jimmy” Carter Junior	39	16	22	6
Joseph Robinette Biden	46	17	14	-3
James Madison	4	18	11	-7
Zachary Taylor	12	19	38	19
James Monroe	5	20	18	-2
Chester Alan Arthur	21	21	33	12
John Adams	2	22	13	-9
William Jefferson Blythe “Bill” Clinton	42	23	12	-11
George Herbert Walker Bush	41	24	19	-5
James Knox Polk	11	25	25	0
Woodrow Wilson	28	26	15	-11
Gerald Ford	38	27	27	0
Martin Van Buren	8	29	28	-1
Grover Cleveland	22	28	26	-2
Herbert Hoover	31	30	36	6
Calvin Coolidge	30	31	34	3
William Howard Taft	27	32	23	-9
Richard Milhous Nixon	37	33	35	2
John Tyler	10	34	37	3
Franklin Pierce	14	35	42	7
Rutherford Birchard Hayes	19	36	29	-7
Andrew Johnson	17	37	43	6
Millard Fillmore	13	38	39	1
James Buchanan	15	39	44	5
Andrew Jackson	7	41	21	-20
Ronald Wilson Reagan	40	42	16	-26
Donald Trump	45	43	45	2
George Walker Bush	43	44	32	-12
James Abram Garfield	20		30	30
William Henry Harrison	9		41	41

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_presidents_of_the_United_States

The War in Ukraine shocked people who have not been observing Russia for quite some time and showed how misguided the foreign policy of the United States has been for at least a decade.

It pains me to say so, but Mitt Romney was right in 2012 when he said Russia is our main adversary. It is extremely unfortunate Obama did not do enough to prevent the War in Ukraine.

To predict an invasion, we are going to need a few things to be true:

• The invader country needs to be significantly larger than the target.
• The invader country is likely to be undemocratic.
• The invader country needs to be able to support its military economically.

The Iraq War was an exception to the rule.

So, we need a combination of a large population, a large economy, and a corrupt, kleptocratic dictatorship.

In other words, Russia.

There are only a few major aggressor countries that have these attributes.

The only dictatorships with a population over 100 million are China and Russia.

If we expand to a democracy score under 4, Ethiopia and Pakistan have the population and authoritarian systems to be suspect, but their economies are terrible. So they will be unable to support their militaries. So, China and Russia remain the biggest threats in the world.

However, China is restricted in its aggression by trade.

If we reduce our threshold to 10 million people and have a GDP per capita threshold of $5000, Cuba, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela will appear on the list.

Cuba is an island nation, and if they attack any of their neighbors, the United States Navy will land in Havana. They cannot do anything. Jamaica is not part of the Rio Pact, but this would be of little value to Cuba.

Iran talks about invading Israel, so this is a possibility, but it is unlikely to succeed. Even though Israel is not part of any military alliance, if they were attacked, they would be defended by the US military.

Saudi Arabia is a major state sponsor of terrorism, as this model predicts.

Venezuela talks about invading Guyana, and since Guyana is not a member of the Rio Pact, Venezuela would succeed. However, Venezuela’s economy is in free fall.

Suppose you have fewer than 10 million people. In that case, it is hard to project influence abroad, and according to my model, only Bahrain has the economy and authoritarian government to be a threat. But their population is only 1.5 million, so they are limited in their evil.

Russia has two obvious targets across the land, Ukraine and Georgia, and they have attacked both of them. Mongolia is another potential target.

China’s potential targets are Mongolia, Bhutan, and Nepal. Bhutan and Nepal are tiny, and India will likely defend them.

However, Mongolia cooperates with the United States in military matters and is also a global partner of NATO.

Every other country is either too democratic, too poor, or too small to be a threat on the global stage.

This map makes the Ukraine war obvious, and also the War in Yemen as why it is seeing so much violence from Saudi Arabia. Africa has a lot of conflicts, but they are regional or usually connected to terrorism.

I think it is likely that the invasion of Ukraine will be the last interstate conflict for a while.

There is a disturbing trend in many circles over the last ten years to not trust the police due to lynching of Black people, primarily but not exclusively men. It is right to be disturbed by this. Police who shoot unarmed civilians should be tried for murder.

They then take things to an extreme and do not report actual abuse, which makes these locations extremely dangerous. They create parallel justice systems designed by well-meaning fools who do not understand the American legal system or any legal system for that matter. They throw away everything required by modern democratic legal systems, which ends up creating systems similar to the legal systems our ancestors revolted against in the 1770s, which was a major reason for the United States seeking independence.

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

The obstructions of justice by the crown were so egregious that they needed two lines of the Declaration of Independence to cover how awful the system was.

America had already seen systems where an abundance of caution was the law in Puritan New England with the Salem Witch Trials. I do not need to go into detail about what happened there; it is why my family left New England. It was a horrible time.

In response to the abuses of the crown and with the memory of what happened in the Salem Witch Trials, the anti-Federalists pushed to ensure the federal government had less power to prevent a repeat of either situation. The result was the Bill of Rights, which includes many important liberties that protect our rights in courts of law.

The legal protections in the Bill of Rights are good and we know what happens today when they are not followed. If you study modern examples of Russia, the treatment of Palestinians, Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, or North Korea, it becomes obvious why laws such as the right to face your accuser, due process, the right to a public jury, habeas corpus, and the right to a lawyer among others are essential to a fair legal system.

The problem with many “alternative methods” of justice is they still enforce a parallel justice system that is as brutal as possible in terms of punishment but without the protections of the American legal system. What inevitably is created is a system that is easily exploited by nefarious actors who seek to control others.

The solution to ending injustice is not to abolish the legal protections created to reduce abuses of power but to ensure that such legal rights are protected for all people.

We must remember where we came from as we seek a more just world.

It’s a fluke of history that Apple turned into the world’s most profitable company. It didn’t have to be this way.

PDAs have been around since the 1980s, but they were clunky and had small screens until the Apple Newton in 1993. The Apple Newton lasted until 1998 and was replaced with the far inferior iPod in 2002. This gave Palm time to build on the strength of the Apple Newton and grow a highly successful business, which lasted until the iPhone was released. If Steve Jobs had built on the Newton instead of shelving it when he was brought back as CEO, Palm would not have had the opportunity to grow like it did in the 2000s.

With Apple out of the picture, Palm became the dominant player in PDAs, and Blackberry became the dominant smartphone player.

iPods before the iPod touch were good, but they were not significantly better than other MP3 players of the era. Apple did not have a significant edge.

Palm had everything it needed to become a trillion-dollar company in the 2000s. It had smartphones and PDAs, but it did not combine them into one device. So, while Palm was busy working on their PDA devices, they did not see the now obvious opportunity to combine them. The last few Palm devices released had a full touchscreen, but they didn’t add phone functionality.

Blackberry had its standard setup at the time, with the full tactile keyboard. But they did not innovate past their original design until it was too late.

I believe that in 2005 Palm was the company best set to become the dominant smartphone manufacturer. Apple was out of the PDA market until the iPod touch was released, Microsoft was busy releasing Windows Vista, and the opportunity was there.

But Palm missed it.

It’s easy to imagine Palm releasing a version of the Palm TX with phone functionality in 2005 and changing the world.

But they just didn’t do it.

So today iPhone is the most popular phone in the world.

You can choose to increase specific carbon free technologies, or choose to reduce emissions, but you cannot do both.

With a carbon tax or a good cap and trade you directly choose how much carbon emissions will be reduced by. But you do not have control on how much of the reduction will be from efficiency, reduced consumption, or substitutes.

With a subsidy you have direct control over how much of a technology will be increased and which technology will be used. But you sacrifice long term control on how much of this will be substituting existing polluting methods, or just increasing consumption of electricity.

That is the question facing policy makers around the world regarding climate change.

There is a lot of talk about how to cover inflation from both Democrats and Republicans. We are seeing various ideas like price caps, scrapping social security taxes, child tax credit, and more options. How do each of these stack up?

To find solutions, we have to divide the economy into sectors. The sectors with the highest inflation are housing, health care, transportation, and education.

The housing price crisis is simple. We did not build enough houses in the 2010s, which led to an increase in prices. Increased demand plus stagnant supply equals inflation. Build housing. That’s the Harris plan. It will work. However, it needs participation from local governments that control zoning laws. Local reforms will solve this problem.

When it comes to transportation, this is because of our addiction to oil and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russia is not a major source of oil for the United States, but the oil market is a global market, so simply drilling oil is not going to fix the global price of oil as much as Republicans want you to believe. That’s before the environmental damage. Transition to hydrogen fuel cells and electric cars in rural areas and massively improve transit and implement congestion pricing in cities so transportation costs are reduced for the average American household.

Education has become more expensive because the government cut subsidies. Subsidize education like we used to, and control costs for universities where we can.

The way you do not solve inflation is by pouring money on the inflation fire. That only creates more inflation. That is the Republican plan by cutting corporate tax rates.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/16/harris-economic-policy-plan-00174336

When it comes to maximum benefit pensions, like exist in most developed democracies, you can pick two of the three when your population is not growing fast enough to cover future benefits:

1. Stable currency
2. High benefits
3. Low taxes (yes, really)

If you choose to keep benefits high and not increase taxes, you will need to print money to cover benefits at a sustained level level, which will likely cause inflation.

Tax rates need to increase if you keep benefits high and keep a stable currency.

Benefits will need to be reduced to keep taxes low and keep a stable currency.

Or you could just use superannuation like Australia and Singapore.

Kamala Harris is going to be the next president of the United States. She consistently leads in the polls, between 3 and 9 points. In the betting odds, her odds are -106 versus Trump’s +118.

She is going to win, and it is not a surprise.

The Keys to the White House is essential to my analysis.

The history of the Democratic Party over the last 100 years can be divided into three categories. Before 1932, the Democratic Party was the governing party of the Solid South. It was socially conservative and economically not much different from the Republicans. This era goes back to before the Civil War.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt founded the modern Democratic Party with the New Deal, the basis of its progressive wing. Democrats won 7 of the following nine elections, and our candidates were excellent. Roosevelt and Truman continued to deliver major policy changes, had no foreign affairs blunders, the economy was continuously improving and had no scandals. There was political chaos and a weak long term economy in 1952 among other issues, plus Eisenhower was extremely charismatic, giving him the win in 1952 and 1956.

The recession of 1960 and Russian advances in the space race gave Kennedy the win in 1960. Both Kennedy and Johnson were charismatic. I disagree with Lichtman’s belief Johnson was not charismatic, he was the most effective president in history in regards to passing human rights law.

The election of 1968 was close, and the Democrats became progressively more socially liberal over the period. The primary election was crazy with Bobby Kennedy being assassinated, and there was a lot of anger in the Vietnam War. I have a suspicion the anger over Vietnam was manufactured to bring down Johnson. We were obligated to defend Vietnam by treaty. Humphrey stood by our treaty and barely lost the election. Unfortunately, he did not convince the American people of the importance of the importance of standing up for our allies, and this is why he was uncharismatic. This was the end of the New Deal era. There was a primary contest, Johnson did not run for reelection, and a stalemate in Vietnam turned too many keys false, giving Nixon the Presidency.

Democrats then moved towards a defensive position and blaming the Great Society for America’s woes in the 1972 election. This was the beginning of the New Democratic caucus. Each Democratic candidate lacked charisma until 2008. We lost badly. We defeated Nixon (yes, I know Ford was running but we were campaigning against Nixon’s actions, and it worked) in 1976 because of Watergate. Carter was a relatively moderate Democrat. Without Watergate to run against we lost in 1980.

Mondale ran a relatively liberal campaign around the Equal Rights Amendment but also promised to raise taxes. 1984 was going to be a hard election no matter what. People perceived America as doing well under Reagan’s term, which prevented social unrest and prevented the scandals of the Reagan presidency from being reported on. Reagan was a professional actor, which increased his charisma. In 1988 the media still favored Bush by not reporting on Reagan’s scandals, and the Reagan Recession was finally over.

The economy was in recession in 1992, which gave Bill Clinton the win. By 1996, the economy was strong, giving Clinton the win.

In 2000 Al Gore would have won if all the votes were counted in Florida.

In 2004, a strong economy and removing the Taliban from power in Afghanistan gave Bush the win. If Democrats had nominated a charismatic candidate and made the PATRIOT ACT into a political issue Bush would have been defeated, but we did not campaign on it. I disagree with the statement Bush did not make a major foreign policy chance, the PATRIOT ACT changed everything.

Most of the candidates since 1968 were relatively conservative and lacked charisma. That is why the Republicans won most of the

By 2008, Democrats had their first charismatic candidate since 1964, a weak economy and a faltering war in Iraq gave Obama an easy win. Bush had 9 false keys, the highest number since 1960.

I disagree Obama was not charismatic in 2012. But it doesn’t matter. Obama had the fewest false keys for any incumbent presidential candidate since Reagan and Bush.

In 2016 we lost because Clinton lacked charisma, barely losing against Donald Trump.

In 2020, we won because of COVID-19. Trump’s weak economy flipped two keys false, giving Biden the win. If there had not been COVID-19 or if Trump had handled it better, Trump would have had six false keys and won the election. In a world without COVID, Trump would have started with 5 false keys, meaning Democrats would have needed a charismatic candidate, and we would have won, giving Trump 6 false keys. I disagree that Trump’s tax reforms count as a major policy change.

This year’s election starts Harris off with a strong hand. Biden passed the most significant gun control legislation since Clinton and the Respect for Marriage Act, both of which are major policies. The economy is strong. There is no major social unrest, despite Likud’s actions in Palestine. The only false keys Harris will have this year are no party mandate since they barely lost the 2022 midterms, no incumbency advantage, and two foreign policy failures in Afghanistan and Gaza. If Ukraine wins before November or Israel withdraws from Gaza we will have a major military success. I’m not certain whether Harris is charismatic or not, but Trump certainly is not.

This is why Harris will win this year.

For 2028, President Harris needs to force a peace agreement between Israel and Palestine, recognize Palestine, and, if Ukraine does not win before November, ensure they win as soon as possible. That will give her foreign military success. She also needs to maintain a strong economy, like every other Democrat over the last century.

Harris needs seven true keys to win in 2028. I think she could have 10 true keys. Here is what Harris needs to do to win in 2028:

1. Run for reelection.
2. Maintain a strong economy, like every other Democrat since 1932.
3. No recession in 2028.
4. Win in Ukraine or finally get a peace agreement signed between Israel and Palestine which will last.
5. Do not send weapons to Israel if they bomb civilians, for that is a military failure. Do not allow Russia to annex Ukraine.
6. Pass a major policy. Health care is a viable target. Pass either single-payer or a public option. Either would count as a major policy.
7. Do not have a scandal, which is unlikely since only one Democrat in the last century has turned the scandal key false: Clinton in 1992.
8. The previous keys being true will ensure she won’t have a serious third-party contender.
9. They also will ensure no social unrest.
10. They also will ensure she will not have a serious primary contender.

The only three keys remaining are whether she or her opponent is perceived as charismatic and whether she has a party mandate in 2028. She has very little power over these. The Party mandate key is controlled by the Democratic National Committee by how they support Democratic candidates for Congress. Charisma is either obvious, such as how Obama is charismatic or can be manufactured by the media through selective reporting. Regardless, the other 10 keys are in control of the administration no matter how the media reports on the President.