Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Facts and Stats: Obama’s First Year

Someone sent me a link to an old CBS News online article about President Obama’s 1st year. It included a “rate the President” poll that asks to rate President Obama on 10 general issues from A to F.

Great, I said, every Teabagger in the country will send an email to every other Teabagger to take the poll. Because what do they know about polls which are carefully conducted over a large sampling rather than over a small rabid portion of the population who will do anything to cast our President in a bag lighting.

And I wasn’t wrong. While Obama enjoys an overall 53% approval rate (the same numbers as voted for him in 2008) according to this poll Obama rates less than 10% in scoring either an A or a B.

So the Rabid Right had their say in this very unscientific and invalid poll.

Leading me to ask why did CBS even do that poll? To what end? Is it because they have noticed that Fox has some pretty good journalistic ideas on how to grab an audience?

Is CBS the next Fox?

Then I looked at a related piece written by CBS correspondent Mark Knoller. This one I did like. This is because Knoller gives us a panoramic view of how Barack Obama has conducted his first year of his presidency versus how his predecessor, Bush-43 conducted his.

The contrast is striking, especially when the identical activities of the two presidents are compared (as shown in the table below).

In their first years of office the following things were done this many times:

Do I have to draw you a picture?

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