by Frank J. Fleming
President Barack Obama is an Ivy League-educated man of considerable intelligence and ambition who has surrounded himself with numerous experts to help in his decision-making. With these advantages, he has tried a number of things to help the country domestically and in the area of foreign affairs. But at the end of the day, how does Obama’s efficacy in office compare to that of a sack of hammers?
It’s somewhat difficult to judge the performance of a president with all the factors that need to be considered and trying to figure out the president’s effect on them, but perhaps the best way to accurately assess the effectiveness of a president is to judge him against the expected performance of a sack of hammers in a similar situation (which is known as the “Coolidge Test”). Basically, the question is: Instead of electing the current president, would the country have been better off taking a burlap sack to Ace Hardware, filling it with approximately one hundred dollars worth of hammers, and placing that in the Oval Office?
As long as it’s an old burlap sack and the hammers were made in America, this is a perfectly constitutional option for president. It’s never been tried, though, so it only exists as a hypothetical. Nevertheless, the nature of a sack of hammers is pretty easy to predict, so we can accurately assess how it would have performed in similar situations versus the more ambitious and active people who tend to be elected president. So let’s go through the issues that Barack Obama has dealt with and, in as fair and balanced a manner as possible, determine whether he has performed better, worse, or about the same as a sack of hammers.
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