The Facts about Presidential Performance
Congratulations go out to Mike Kimel and Michael Kanell on the sale of their book The Facts: How Democratic & Republican Presidents Really Perform on the Issues that Matter Most, to Black Dog & Leventhal.
One of the most vexing things about discussing any aspect of politics is that there’s so much information (and disinformation) out there that it seems almost impossible to pin anything down. Even economists (i.e. people who should theoretically know) often can’t answer the most basic of questions, such as which president produced the most growth (nope, not Reagan - he was 3rd), or which president has been the worst with the national debt. And when you start to look at other issues, such as which presidents had the highest crime and abortion rates, which presidents performed best with the value of the dollar, or with health insurance and home ownership - you can forget about reaching any kind of consensus.
That’s where The Facts comes in. The authors have come up with a terrific concept wherein they look at more than 40 different issues people care about. They go back half a century (beginning with the Eisenhower administration) and use only government sources for the stats they provide. They also provide all their sources and show readers exactly what they’re doing. They even encourage the reader to get involved and look at the numbers for themselves, and once the book is published they’ll even have a website that will serve as a repository for all the information in the book. That way there’s no massaging of the numbers and no political bias whatsoever. Then they rank the presidents and talk about who did well, who did poorly, and why.
A lot of very fascinating things come out in the book. For instance, the presidents who produced the greatest growth (Real GDP per capita) were JFK & LBJ, followed by Clinton and then Reagan (who were just about tied, with Clinton getting the edge) and then Carter (yes, Carter). And overall, when you look back as far as Ike, Democratic presidents have performed much better in producing growth than Republicans, which most people find surprising. There are a lot of other fascinating things as well, such as the Clinton administration actually having one of the lowest abortion rates.
Mike Kimel taught both Economics and Advanced Statistics in the Graziado School of Business and Management at Pepperdine University for five years, ran the internal consulting group and developed competitive strategies for a Fortune 500 telecom company, and worked for a Big 4 accounting firm. His co-author is Michael Kanell, an economics writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Kanell has been a journalist for 25 years and has appeared on CNBC and NPR.
Black Dog & Leventhal has also brought in a fantastic illustrator named Nigel Holmes, who has produced beautiful & informative graphics for clients such as Wired, CNN, Discover, Time magazine, the Atlantic, Details, and dozens of others.
