The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Presidents, by Stephen Hayward

While Steven Hayward's The Politically Incorrect Guide to The Presidents: From Wilson to Obama isn't as good as his The Age of Reagan: 1964-1980, it was still an informative and entertaining read.

Hayward takes the approach of rating the presidents based on their job description, which is basically:

• Preside over the military as commander-in-chief
• Execute the laws passed by congress
• Ensure the laws passed are constitutional (if not, veto them)
• Nominate Supreme Court justices

Furthermore, the President must take this oath of office:

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

Hayward's book is important because it reviews each of the presidents, starting with Woodrow Wilson, grading them according to how well they performed their job description and upheld the oath of office. He starts with Wilson in 1913 because it was Wilson who first significantly expanded the job of president beyond the job description laid out in the Constitution. Before Wilson, presidents performed their duty by commanding the military in times of war (e.g. Lincoln, Madison) or keeping the congress in check by vetoing unconstitutional laws (Hayward gives wonderful examples from Madison, Pierce, Buchanan and Cleveland).

I agreed with most of Hayward's ratings for the early presidents. But for the presidents since Reagan, I thought he had a Republican vs. Democrat bias which wasn't supported by the examples he provided. Since this book was published in the election year of 2012, I believe part of the purpose was to get people to vote against Obama and so the later rankings had more partisan bias. But this doesn't detract from the value of this book which is the assessment of how the U.S. Presidents of the last hundred years lived up to their duty to protect the Constitution.

Permutation City, by Greg Egan

I heard about Permutation City from H. C. Bonner's blog who contacted me about my Fourier Life website. Since I'm also interested in cellular automata and how they might be used to discover the origin of life, I downloaded the sample of Permutation City onto my Kindle.

The book started out well. It was well-written with a good style, a somewhat rare quality of science fiction. There was mystery and interesting characters, so when I got to the end of the sample I purchased the book (only $2.99).

With the Kindle sample, usually around 5% of the book, it is easy to judge character and style, but it's impossible to judge the structure since the first plot point--the central conflict--doesn't appear until around 25%. And if the book doesn't follow a standard structure, it's also impossible to tell from the sample.

In the case of Permutation City, the first plot point didn't come until 88% of the book! As a result, for most of the book I was wondering: Who are these people? What are they after? How do they fit together? Why should I care? Once I got the answers at the 88% mark, I was interested. But because the book was almost over, the development and resolution were rushed and quite unsatisfying. The central idea of the book was intriguing, but the flawed structure destroyed any chance of making it into an interesting story.

The Age of Reagan: 1964-1980, by Steven Hayward

The Age of Reagan: 1964-1980 by Stephen Hayward is an excellent book. It is subtitled "The Fall of the Old Liberal Order" which is the main reason I read it. Reagan is in the background for most of the book--this story is more about the conditions that occurred in the 15 years before Reagan was elected which paved the way for the "Reagan Revolution."

I turned 12 in 1980 so I don't remember anything political of the sixties or seventies. I didn't have any experience with gas lines and I was only vaguely aware of the Iranian hostage crisis. My first political memory is an assignment by our teacher to find out whom our parents supported in the 1980 election. I remember my teacher was for Anderson and my mother supported Reagan, explaining that "since he's an actor, his speeches won't be boring."

The Age of Reagan: 1964-1980 was an excellent history lesson for me. I read it mostly on my Nexus 7 Android tablet which was great for looking up additional material as I was reading, such as Nelson Rockefeller flipping the bird to the media, Reagan's debate with Buckley over the Panama Canal, and Jimmy Carter's famous "malaise speech," among many, many others. Seeing many of the events described in the book first-hand also allowed me to confirm that Hayward is an honest observer of the events, even though he is biased toward Reagan and his ideas (as am I).

The years 1964-1980 are important because, according to my father who was 23 in 1964, those were the years when things in America took a turn for the worse. After the years of the great depression and World War II (1930-1945), the fifties and early sixties were a return to normalcy. The economy was growing, and there was a great sense of optimism in the country. It was just that optimism and prosperity that got the liberals into trouble once Johnson was elected president in 1964.

LBJ used the power of government to declare a "War on Poverty" at home and to expand the war in Vietnam abroad. The failure of both of these wars was an early indictment of liberal ideas and allowed Nixon to be elected in 1968. However, Nixon was one of the worst offenders against free markets, implementing price-and-wage controls and taking the dollar off of the gold standard. Nixon also did great harm to the Republican party by lying about Watergate. This allowed the Democrats to reclaim the presidency with Carter, who introduced more regulations on energy production and had a disastrous appeasement strategy in foreign policy highlighted by the Iranian hostage crisis.

The extreme government interference in the economy and weak stand against communism by LBJ, Nixon and Carter paved the way for Reagan to easily win the election in 1980 on a campaign of free-market reforms and a strong, moral opposition to the Soviet Union. I plan to read the second volume from Hayward, The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution: 1980-1989, and I hope it's as good as the first volume. LBJ, Nixon and Carter demonstrated over 15 years that government manipulation of the economy doesn't work. But it wasn't until Reagan demonstrated that free-markets work that the rest of the world took notice and started their own reforms toward capitalism. This, I believe, is a big part of "What Went Right."