Still fuming about the ranking of presidents by the Presidential Greatness Project, economist Robert F. Graboyes has produced his own ratings of presidents at Bastiat’s Window:

Two recent BW posts (“Polls, Pols, and Poli-Sci” and “Presidential Prodigiousness Potpourri”) lambasted the Bizarro World of presidential rankings from the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey.

Such ratings are bound to be fraught, influenced as they are by recency bias, ideology, partisan preference, and just plain personal taste. I suspect that some of Dr. Graboyes’s dissatisfaction stems from the peculiarly high ratings in the PGP of Clinton, Obama, and Biden along with the lower ratings of recent Republican presidents with Trump at the very bottom of the pack.

I actually prefer Dr. Graboyes’s “tier” system (top tier with at least one major, distinctive accomplishment; second tier in which the positive accomplishments outweigh the negative, etc.) to absolute ratings (first, second, third). His top tier presidents are Washington, Jefferson, Monroe, Polk, Lincoln, T. Roosevelt, FDR, Truman, Reagan) while his bottom tier consists of Pierce, Buchanan, A. Johnson, Wilson, Hoover, and Carter.

I think that both the PGP and Dr. Graboyes have more of an appetite for American Empire than I. Is it possible for the United States to be secure and promote international institutions without American hegemony? We’ll never know because that’s the policy we’ve been pursuing for the last 40 years. Maybe there’s a better description of our official policy of “military primacy in every theater” than “American hegemony” but that’s how it looks to me. The irony of such a policy is that neither of our political parties are willing to admit the implications of such a policy.

Anyhow I found the post interesting with some fun graphics. Produce your own rankings as you will. My pick for the greatest president of the post-war period would be Eisenhower and the worst Carter.

I have found Axios to be an increasingly interesting site. The graph at the top of this page was sampled from the linked post there. As the Democratic National Convention recedes into memory I think it’s worth thinking about what it all meant a bit.

I think it’s interesting and revealing that viewership of both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions have declined so much since 2008. They’re down about 40%.

I think there are multiple things going on. For one thing you can only claim historic milestones so many times before it all becomes so much noise. Barack Obama’s nomination was historic. So was Hillary Clinton’s but Sec. Clinton’s was nearly an anticlimax. The Clinton Administration had been almost 20 years before after all. The reality of the 2024 DNC despite all of the media hooplah was that Democrats couldn’t muster much more enthusiasm for watching it than they did in the middle of the pandemic.

I think it’s generational change and it’s not just politics. The viewership among young people for watching the Super Bowl has declined over the last 10 years. Televised national conventions may not be as effective a way of reaching people as they were in second half of the last century.

Axios suggests the conventions invite Internet influencers. I suspect the events themselves are less interesting than they used to be.

Pretty soon they’re going to be history.

Yesterday Mamie, Rainday’s Put the Blame on Mame, one of our Australian Shepherds, was awarded her AKC Detective Scentwork title. That took a lot of time, dedication, and hard work, something Australian Shepherds excel in. Congratulations, Mamie!

In a Detective Class competition an unknown number of “hides” in a variety of environments are found by the dog. The intent is to emulate as closely as possible the work of a true detection dog.

I’ll try to update this post with a picture of Mamie at work.

Writers are struggling for analogies for Kamala Harris from American history. In some sense she seems to be channeling Hubert Humphrey (an odd pick), the last Democrat to be thrust into Democratic frontrunner status after the sitting president removed his name from candidacy.

Here’s a comparison that may not have occurred to you: Gerald Ford. If she is elected president she, like Ford, will have done so without ever having won a vote in a primary. That’s a comparison I doubt the Harris campaign would like. Ford lost to Carter when he actually ran for re-election after becoming president when Nixon resigned.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Ruy Teixeira argues that the Harris campaign will dash to the center as part of their election strategy:

As the Republican Party embraced Donald Trump in 2016, the Democrats began to move to the left by associating their party with a series of views on crime, immigration, free speech, race and sex that are far from those of the median voter. These unpopular views are amplified by Democratic-leaning media. That’s why the Democrats have failed to establish themselves as a unifying party that can consistently beat the Trumpified GOP.

Now they have to defend the record of an unpopular administration. They can ill afford to be dragged down by radicalism on social issues. It would make sense to jettison most of this radicalism and adopt moderate, centrist positions. Will they?

Kamala Harris’s nascent campaign has been widely lauded for its strategic savvy. But it has been short on substance, leaning heavily on “vibes,” “memes” and pent-up partisan enthusiasm. Could there be a place in this emerging campaign for anything potentially controversial within the party, like a decisive turn away from cultural radicalism?

The balance of the op-ed provides examples of how that might be accomplished. Frankly, I doubt it.

The Harris campaign is in something of a pickle. They can’t run on her record, particularly if the economy continues to slow down. They can’t run on her principles and ideas because to the extent that she has any they appear to conflict with the views that the the “median voter” holds. They may not even be aligned with the views of the median Democratic voter. To date the campaign has been sufficiently content-free it’s hard to tell.

What I suspect they will do is suggest that the vice president holds views different from those she may actually hold (without actually saying so) and continue to run on “vibes” and identity (another form of “vibes”). If they can do with, castigating Trump all the way, for the next two months, they’ve got it made.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has revised its estimates of job growth over the last year downwards by more than 800,000 jobs. Josh Shafer reports at Yahoo Finance:

The US economy employed 818,000 fewer people than originally reported as of March 2024, showing the labor market may have been cooling long before initially thought.

The revisions are a yearly practice from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; final revised numbers are expected to be released early next year.

The report, released Wednesday morning, showed the largest downward revisions to the professional and business services industry, where employment was revised down by 358,000 during the period. Leisure & hospitality saw the second-largest downward revision of 150,000.

The report moves down the monthly job additions seen in the US economy over the time period to 174,000 from 242,000.

“Despite this big downward revision, that’s still a very healthy growth rate in terms of the monthly jobs added to the economy,” Omair Sharif, Inflation Insights president, told Yahoo Finance.

I think that’s about right. Job growth was still good; it just wasn’t as good as previously estimated. For context consider this graph:

That chart does not include the downwards revision. As you can the revision is not catastrophic.

To my eye more concerning is this from Business Insider. The M2 money supply has decreased, a sign that spelled every time it has occurred in the last century.

The US money supply is flashing a major warning to the US economy, according to Wharton professor Jeremy Siegel.

M2 money supply, which includes cash, checking deposits, and other highly liquid assets, bottomed out around $20.7 trillion in April this year amid aggressive rate hikes, according to Federal Reserve data. That’s a 4% drawdown from the prior all-time-record of $21.7 trillion, which was recorded in 2021.

Money supply then rebounded through the summer, but has recently returned to its decline, nearing April’s low.

That marks the the longest stagnation in the M2 money supply since World War II, Siegel said in an interview with CNBC on Monday.

The feeling seems to be that recession is likely over the next six months. The reason it is more troubling than your run-of-the-mill economic slowdown is our flat output. That suggests that deficit spending to stimulate the economy will go straight to inflation.

Unlike some I don’t have a problem with the federal government meddling with the economy. I just think it ought to meddle in the direction of greater production rather than greater consumption. Unfortunately, the direction of policy has been wrong for a very long time.

The second night of the 2024 Democratic National Convention has passed and it was largely peaceful. There were more violent demonstrations and attendant arrests than Monday.

Let’s hope it remains mostly peaceful.

One day down; three more to go. No major upheaval. So far so good with the Democratic National Convention.

I did not watch the convention proceedings of the Democratic National Convention here in Chicago last night. Fifty years ago I followed the national political conventions with rapt attention. I just don’t have it in me any more. Did I miss anything?

On a lighter note things are still fulminating in Dolton. The police chief there just received a vote of no confidence.

As it turns out it’s not just the WSJ bureau chief and I who are puzzled about Ukraine’s strategic objectives. At Foreign Policy John R. Deni does some speculation of his own:

Why send thousands of forces north when Ukrainian territory is being lost elsewhere? Why incentivize Moscow to reinforce a border region that has been relatively quiet, hence creating a longer-term security dilemma for Ukraine? Why not wait until Ukrainian units in the east and south were robust enough to leverage any siphoning of Russian forces resulting from an operation in the north?

Whatever Kyiv’s actual goals may be, the operation holds important insights regarding the long-term trajectory of the war. It’s possible, although not yet certain, that the Kursk offensive is not merely an opportunistic gambit but rather part of a broader military campaign that could stretch well into 2025, purposefully setting the stage for operations elsewhere.

Secondly, the offensive appears to provide evidence of Ukrainian ability to leverage Western training in a way unseen during the failed counteroffensive of 2023, namely by using combined arms maneuver warfare—the synchronization of various combat tools in a way that shocks, disorients, and ultimately defeats an adversary.

If these preliminary conclusions crystallize, the Kursk offensive could prove to be a major turning point.

He goes on:

Some observers have speculated that the operation is intended largely for political purposes. Certainly, at the strategic level—and at a time when many in the West are now considering what Ukrainian forces will need to initiate a broad counteroffensive in 2025—the Kursk operation may generate optimism among Ukraine’s supporters and bolster their willingness to continue funding and training. Evidence for this already exists in some of the reactions across the West.

However, it is difficult to believe that the principal aim of the Kursk offensive—10 days old as of Aug. 16—is purely political, intended to strengthen Kyiv’s bargaining position in (nonexistent) peace talks, guarantee additional Western assistance, undermine Russian President Vladimir Putin’s authority at home, or facilitate prisoner exchanges.

Of course, as all students of Prussian Gen. Carl von Clausewitz know, warfare is an extension of politics. But to conclude that Ukraine would send thousands of troops north on a risky operation into Russian territory while its forces to the south and east are slowly losing ground for purely political reasons seems dubious at best.

Alternatively, some Ukrainian officials have claimed that the Kursk operation is intended to complicate the flow of forces from elsewhere in Russia to Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk region. This seems doubtful, given the relatively limited extent of the operation so far and the lack of evidence regarding the interdiction of major rail lines, roadways, or other transportation infrastructure or platforms related to the flow of personnel and equipment into Donetsk. Ukrainian forces would have to drive farther east into Russia, probably to the rail junction at Voronezh, roughly 200 miles to the east of the border town of Sudzha in Kursk Oblast, or roughly the same distance headed southeast toward Valuyki, to interdict the rail lines or roads that eventually make their way into Ukraine’s Donbas.

Ukrainian officials have also claimed that the Kursk offensive was intended to enable the destruction of Russian facilities and platforms engaged in glide bomb and other long-range operations against Ukrainian territory. On Aug. 13, a Ukrainian official argued that Kyiv’s forces lacked enough long-range weapons to hit these targets from across the border. However, that very night, Ukraine conducted its largest drone operation to date, reportedly sending scores of drones to hit facilities and platforms across a wide swath of Russian territory, including in Kursk, Belgorod, Voronezh, Volgograd, Bryansk, Orel, Rostov, and faraway Nizhny Novgorod—approximately 500 miles from the Ukrainian border.

Somewhat more likely than all these other rationales, and as some Ukrainian officials have indicated, the operation seems designed to relieve pressure on Ukrainian forces in the south and east. It may also force Moscow’s military planners to consider the longer-term defense of Russia’s border with northern Ukraine, tying down more troops there and introducing a new constraint on Russian commanders. So far, there have been some reports that Russian officials have diverted troops from the southern portion of the front as well as from Kaliningrad.

However, even if pressure is relieved, it is unlikely that Ukrainian troops in the east and south will have the wherewithal to conduct a counteroffensive of their own, at least in the short run.

That may explain why activists in Kaliningrad have been doing some saber-rattling lately. He continues to speculate that Ukrainians are putting their Western training in “combined arms warfare” to good use which I find pretty unlikely. I suspect this particular offensive is purely Ukrainian in its methods and purposes. Has any evidence to the contrary been produced?