Legal Commentary

As I was doing my exam grading this season, I started thinking about what grade might be justifiably given to President Barack Obama at roughly the mid-point of his first term in office.  And, in thinking about this question, I struggled to come up with potential "objective" metrics for grading a president. 

The stock market and unemployment statistics are obvious metrics for trying to assess the state of the economy, but the link between cycles in the economy and presidential activities are never uncontroversial.  The number of terror attacks or soldier deaths might be viewed as a metric of the Commander-in-Chief, though again various developments in foreign affairs cannot always be reasonably attributed to presidential decision-making.  And I have placed the term "objective" in quotes above because, of course, there surely are many metrics that would be seen in different ways by different groups (e.g., judges confirmed, government spending and debt, etc.).  

So, bringing this thinking out loud, I wonder if the Prawfs group of serial graders have thoughts about how we might -- and/or whether we should even aspire to -- develop a set of  "objective" metrics for assessing a president's success.