In bagging bin Laden, is a second term for Obama in the bag?

Author: Stephanie Kovalchik

Osama bin Laden in 1997

Details of the manhunt leading to the death of Osama bin Laden are beginning to flood the media. Punctuated by tales of interrogation, surveillance tech wizardry, car chases and helicopter attacks, the emerging story of the last months of the CIA-lead mission toward the final EKIA (Enemy Killed in Action, for those who don't know) could rival a plot of the show 24. With the swiftness of Sunday's assault on bin Laden's Escobaresque compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan and with no American lives lost, Operation Geronimo was an unquestionable success. US citizens may never know the identities of the intelligence team that put an end to the menace who has been terrorizing their nation since Al-Qaeda's first targeted attack against American troops in 1992. But they can celebrate a commander-in-chief who, remarkably, oversaw the mission to its victorious conclusion amidst the contending concerns of a near government shutdown, an American South devastated by storms, and one tycoon's hysteric suspicions over the legitimacy of his presidency.

President Obama in Metropolis, IL, 2006.

The next US president will be chosen on Nov. 6, 2012, less than one year and a half away. When 18 months separate today's jubilation from the sentiments voters will have on election day, what impact will bin Laden's death have on President Obama's prospects for four more years in office? How will this victory sway voter opinion when Americans reflect on Obama's first term and judge what kind of president he has been?

Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. got interested in perceptions about presidents in the mid 1940s and began collecting survey data of historians to see what insights about presidential greatness their rankings of former presidents could provide. This research stimulated a number of follow-up expert-opinion polls, some conducted by other academics, including Schlesinger's son, others by media organizations, such as C-SPAN and The Wall Street Journal. Although the cohort of presidents has always grown with each survey, expert views have been quite consistent. In every poll, the list of the ten best presidents has always included George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, while the rear echelon has invariably been populated by Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Warren G. Harding. A 2007 Rasmussen Reports poll of a random sample of 1,000 US adults found that public opinion was, for the most part, in-line with the experts. Average Joes differed only in their view of Woodrow Wilson, putting the schoolmaster of politics at the humbling rank of 19.

The consistency in survey results has convinced some social scientists that there must be some universal principles behind the concept of presidential greatness. While numerous researchers have attempted to uncover these fundamental factors, the uncontested leader in this quest is Dr. Dean Keith Simonton, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis who has spent 30 years developing and testing a model to describe how individuals decide what makes a president great. As part of this research, Simonton compiled a database which contains a myriad of factors about the character of past presidents and the context of their tenure in office. Using regression analysis, he has tried to narrow in on the variables which best explain the presidential rankings gathered over the past half-century.

From these data explorations, Simonton identified a regression model that gives R-squareds of 0.8 or more when tested on multiple datasets of presidential rankings, outperforming all of its competitors. Such a high-performing model might be expected to be inordinately intricate, like the complex inner workings of Google's search algorithm. Yet Simonton's model is fairly simple. It claims that judgment about presidential greatness can be accurately inferred knowing only six factors. Three of the factors concern the personal characteristics of a president: intellectual brilliance, valiant service in war, and a life free from public scandal (the most influential factor of the six). The other three determinants are out of a president's control and deal with the circumstances of his time and exit from office: length of tenure, holding office during a time of war, and a life cut short by assassination. In other words, Simonton's model says that a president who is most like Abraham Lincoln is most likely to win history's favor. And, as a self-proclaimed student and idealizer of Lincoln, President Obama's career is, in a way, a trial of Simonton's science.

Still predicting presidential greatness is one thing, predicting election behavior another. When Americans head to the polls it will not be to sum up Obama's legacy but to look toward the future and decide if the nation will be better off with Obama in command. Barring the revelation of a hoax or a savage Al-Qaeda retaliation, President Obama will be able to stand proudly at the helm during the re-election campaign. Even if unemployment numbers remain against him, other numbers are strongly on his side: zero serious Republican contenders (as of now) to compete for the seat in the oval office, 5 to 1 odds in favor of past presidential incumbent, and one historic executive order that eliminated the single most pernicious foe to ever threaten American security.