Note: a few people have pointed out that the president is restrained by senators and congressmen etc—I realise that; but if we are willing to admit that presidents do have some effect in society, we should be prepared to measure them.
If I go to a homeopath and get better afterwards, I could use the metric of my health to measure that the homeopath is great at helping me.
While you might not reason that way in the domain of medicine and see the error if I frame that example this way, you want to reason this way in the political domain. You want to measure the quality of a presidency by looking at one run of the presidency.
Establishing causality is hard. Given that politics is the mind killer, this kind of poor reasoning often comes up in political discussions.
If I go to a homeopath and get better afterwards, I could use the metric of my health to measure that the homeopath is great at helping me.
While you might not reason that way in the domain of medicine and see the error if I frame that example this way, you want to reason this way in the political domain. You want to measure the quality of a presidency by looking at one run of the presidency.
Establishing causality is hard. Given that politics is the mind killer, this kind of poor reasoning often comes up in political discussions.
If you are generally looking for metrics, take a look at https://goodcountry.org/index/overall-rankings .