 Good day, May 40 here. So, when I was in college taking political science courses, there was quite a bit of discussion about presidential character. Okay, that was a book by, I believe, a Duke University political science professor named James David Barber. He was the chair of the political science department of Duke, and he published a famous book almost 50 years ago, so essentially around 1970, and it was called The Presidential Character, Predicting Performance in the White House. And reading from a column here by Robert and Mary, I'll link it in the description, published July 22, 2020. So it's a really good read, not just to learn about presidential character, but to think about your own character. So the book's called The Presidential Character, Predicting Performance in the White House by James David Barber. Now, the book's largely forgotten today, but it caused quite a stir when it first showed up in 1972. And it was still quite talked about in the 1980s when I was at college. So James Barber died in 2004, and this book looks at qualities of temperament and personality in assessing how the country's chief executives approached the presidency and how that contributed to their success or failure in office, and you can just apply that to yourself. Yeah, show me the money, show me the money. Make it rain, make it rain. So I was blown away by the insights I learned from my political science professor, Larry White. Okay, so my buddy, Ricardo, is here. So this is going to be a great stream for about as long as Ricardo is sticking around. Man, I'm like Tom Landry, okay? Ricardo's my ruggist store back. Tom Landry was like cold, repressed, not spontaneous, and he wanted people to run his system. So I tend to be quite inflexible with the way I interact with people. So I've got a system for my show, a system for my life, and people need to fit into my system or reality. So Ricardo is my ruggist store back, like hot-blooded, impulsive, intuitive. He comes into the game, and I say, Ricardo, I want you to run this play. And he goes to the line of scrimmage, and he bloody calls an audible. He draws up his own plays in the huddle, and then he sends Drew Pearson out on a post, and he throws the pass, he wins the game, but damn it, he didn't run my system. He's just supposed to be doing what I tell him to do. It's 40's system, and he's audibling out of the plays, he's drawing up his own plays in the huddle, and then he's winning the game. Man, oh man, yeah, we could win many Superballs together, but then I wouldn't get the credit, all right? I gotta get the credit, I gotta be seen as the genius here. Ricardo should be just understood as an extension. But if I let Ricardo cook, okay, and we win a bunch of, like, live-streaming Superballs, I'm not gonna get the credit. Ricardo's gonna get the credit. And then, like, where's all 40? Okay, how much the willingness of people to be sources for gossip journalists is about using the journalists as a weapon to settle personal scores. So that is certainly a very considerable, perhaps probably the largest reason that people serve as sources for gossip journalists, but here's another reason. Okay, I have had disproportionate success in getting people to open up to me, and why is that? Because I'm very quick, I have an ability to establish a trauma bond with people. Like, people recognize that there's something broken in me, and so they don't feel judged by 40, right? You know, the King of Splooge does not judge, right? The unsung hero of Jiggly Queen's III does not judge. You know, the bare-chested advocate of BDSM in Hebrew Cotsky does not judge. Anyway, I often establish a rapport with people based on trauma bonding that we went through, perhaps some kind of similar trauma, and people sense that and feel that, and so they will confide in me. So the people who... Well, I'm thinking one person in particular exposed Mark Wallace to me. I'm not sure he was doing it to try to settle a score. He was trying to stop the transmission of HIV in the industry. About a dozen actresses have caught HIV from this guy operating recklessly for about four years. Do you think that your success in porn journalism would not have been as easily replicated in another industry because of the trauma bond ability? Well, I'm stealing a thought from Neil Strauss. So Neil Strauss is a pop journalist, writes a lot for Rolling Stone. He wrote the book The Game, The Secret Society of Pick-Up Artists, and then he wrote the book The Truth about love and relationships, about his time in rehab for sex addiction and his recovery from sex and love addiction. And he noted that he had the ability to trauma bond with people, and so he would get Hollywood stars to open up to him. So I'll just leave that as a question mark. I mean, I've had the ability to get people to open up to me completely outside of the porn industry. I can do it on a live stream. I can do it through just talking to the chat or through DMs. Certain people feel very comfortable opening up to me, and I think it has something to do with trauma bonding. But obviously I've never replicated the same success that I had with the Mark Wallace story. So there I broke a story that, you know, forced the suspension of a guy who was transmitting HIV all around San Fernando Valley over the course of four years. So that was a pretty big story, but then I had the biggest story in California in 2007. So I broke the story about the mayor of Los Angeles, how he was getting divorced. It turned out to be a whole story who's carrying on an affair with a Spanish-language TV newscaster and reporter. And at the same time that Gavin Newsom, then the mayor of San Francisco, he was being outed for, I think, with his best friend's wife. So it was the summer of love in 2007. And I got the ball rolling with my blog post about the mayor. He initially denied the story to the LA Times, but I broke the dam, and then other journalists finally got on the story. Now, they were aware of the story, but they thought it was kind of beneath them. So I talked that kind of gossip, particularly not about the first Latino mayor of Los Angeles in over 100 years. But once I broke it on my blog, then other journalists felt obliged that they had to cover it. So Amy Klein said something similar. So Amy Klein was the managing editor of the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles. And she wrote a piece in the New York Times, September 5, 2008, my very own cyber stalker. When I met the blogger Luke Ford at a media party six years ago, I had no idea who he was. So he had no idea he would become my cyber stalker. He was just some guy tall-ish and thin-ish with a ruddy face and a disarming Australian accent who started talking to me. He wore a skull cap atop his brown hair, which was just beginning to thin. Since moving to Los Angeles to be the managing editor of the Jewish Journal, I met many of the single religious guys in town, especially those in the small world of Jewish news media. How had I not met him? Maybe he'd be good for my reporter friend Gabby. I thought maybe I can set them up. He's kind of cute. The next day at work, I told Gabby about him. She rolled her eyes and said, look him up online. So Gabby's Australian, Jewish, not a big fan of mine. I typed in his name, and there it was, the entire text of our conversation the previous night, including my maligning of the newspaper's top advertiser. This guy I called out to Gabby. He used to cover the porn industry, she said. Be careful to go to Lukevoord.net, not .com, where you'll get a million pop-ups. After he converted to Judaism, she explained, he began covering the Jewish community, in particular Jewish media. Don't pay any attention to him, she said. But it was hard not to. When you're a journalist, cataloging, yeah, but Antonio Vila Regosa, I think I may have ended his political career. Like, after he's served out his term as mayor, he's been done. It was hard not to pay attention to Lukevoord. When you're a journalist, cataloging the words and actions of others, you believe you are granted a writer's type of diplomatic community and you are to being written about, reported on, and critiqued yourself. Well, that's how it used to be before the internet. Lukevoord started writing about me on his blog. I wasn't familiar with the ethics of blogging. Oh, lack thereof. My life was like that Seinfeld episode when the comedian Kathy Griffin starts using Jerry in her act. And all his complaints appear in his lawsuit, appear in her act. Jerry Seinfeld is the devil. At least Lukevoord wasn't diverting his entire blog about me. I called my newspaper's lawyer and showed him the post. What if Ford didn't stop writing about me? My lawyer said we could send Fordy a threatening letter a question whether it would help. Fordy hadn't written anything libelous about me, that I was shy. A letter might just provoke him. Could I talk to anyone else Ford wrote about? Oh, he gets obsessed. A scout inside found that the radio host named Dennis Prager. His name kept popping up. Oh, he gets obsessed with people, but he eventually finds someone else. Prager told me with a hint of relief, perhaps of the fact that he was no longer Ford's target. Prager was right and wrong. Fordy didn't exactly lose interest in me. Rather, he soured on my work, saying I was a fanatic who radiates hostility, judging me to be too substantial, to be knocked out by a mere slim book doing so would require nothing less than a Talmudic tractate. Over the next couple of years, Fordy and I settled into an uneasy relationship. He wrote nasty and stalkerish things about me, and I ignored him, but it wasn't easy. His blog's popularity ensured that when a potential suitor or editor searched for information about me online, Ford's posts were the first to appear. Ford called my writing indifferent. He said I was compelling in my delusions. Time, and again, I heard friends say with alarm, hey, Amy, do you know there's a guy on the internet who writes all these things about you? It was oddly flattering to have someone obsessed with me, even someone like Luke Ford. Under the title, the Hitchhiker's Guide to Amy Klein, Ford wrote, oh, I used to love to make you cry. It made me feel like a man inside. If I had been a man in reality, you'd be here, baby, loving me. Now my nights are long and lonely, and I ain't too proud, babe. My friends, my suitors, my editors were worried, but at this point he'd been writing about me for years, and he never approached my residents or called or even sent me an email message. Don't worry, I told them, he's mostly harmless, except that professionally he was causing me problems. He was always hounding our newspaper to cover scandals in the Jewish community. As a blogger, he had relaxed standards as to sources, so people with access to Grine came to him while I, he would give them a forum, and then I had to write a new story about it. Why don't we write a story about Luke Ford, my editor suggested? I didn't want to. I didn't want to give him the satisfaction. I didn't want to meet with him. I especially didn't want to give him the opportunity to engage in a meta interview. My reporting, then, his blogging about my reporting. So the Luke Ford article was shelved until another writer came along and wrote it, the development that displaced Ford. I always thought this article would come at the hands of Amy Cline, he wrote. I pictured us over lunch and how I'd whip out my tape recorder when she started the on-the-record part of our conversation and all the brilliant justifications I'd give her for my abominable behavior. But then my time came at the hand of 25-year-old Brad Greenberg. Brad's a good reporter, but he's no Amy Cline. The whole thing didn't run anything like my fantasies. Brad was one of the young new additions to the newspaper. In other words, Daniel Barron, a tall blonde Floridian with a passion for this business that reminded me of me, circa 1995. So this is published in The New York Times in 2008. The minute I laid eyes on her, I knew she would one day replace me. My cyber stalker confirmed it. Under the headline, the Jewish Journal adds sex appeal. He wrote, I've had my share of fantasies about religion writer Amy Cline. Who hasn't? But the times are changing. The Jewish Journal now boasts calendar girls and a pair of hotties. When you're young and pretty, nothing outranges you more than unwanted, persistent attention. You want to be taken seriously. But as you get older and people start to ignore your looks and do begin to take you seriously as a professional, you feel like yesterday's news. I suppose to Ford, I was like Sophia Loren, a classic yet thing of the past. When I finally left the Jewish Journal after seven years, I didn't think much about my cyber stalker. I was busy with my career. I kept going back to Ford's blog and I kept returning day after day and there was never any mention of me leaving the Jewish Journal. Nothing in fact about me at all. So why had Ford dumped me? Someone's going to document and critique your life. Shouldn't he stick it out to the end? That's the final act. And then finally, Amy Klein, why didn't you tell me? Honey went. She left two weeks ago. Normally I have a satellite circling Amy Klein from about a hundred miles overhead, but I've been distracted of late. Amy emailed everybody in her life about 100 or so persons. That list did not include your humble correspondent and my brothers. He cataloged my departure, my new projects and the email announcement I had sent. He wondered about my future career, but I hadn't told him. And what would happen to me? I miss you, baby, he wrote. Well, Luke, you might never guess it, but I'll miss you too. So that's Amy Klein. Glory Day is retrospective. We come to Luke Ford live stream channel. Okay. Let's go to the chat. How did you avoid getting shunned by the industry after revealing his secrets? I always try to let people win. So there'd be a lot of angry confrontations. Like people would be furious at me and people would blow their stack at me. And so I would always try to let people win. I wouldn't put them down. So I'm posting the Amy Klein article in the chat. So I wouldn't put people down. I always try to enable people to feel like they'd won after they'd spoken to me. Like give people good rational psychological reasons for talking to me. And I didn't... I didn't exalt in my successes. I didn't try to build myself up as more than I was. I don't think I had delusions of grandeur or comparatively few. I mean, I'm sure I did at times, but I don't think I gave off the vibe that I'm better than you. It was a lot harder though. So initially everyone was just talking to me. So I had the best material in 1998. That was the golden year. But after that people wised up, became much more circumspect about what people told me. And it became much more difficult to replicate my success. So maybe I never again had anything approaching the success that I had in the first six months of 1998. Seems like it isn't a sustainable profession revealing an industry's secrets. It's not easy. You have to give people incentives to communicate with you. And so people get smart. Like even dumb people get the hint that whether or not it's worth it talking to someone. Did Gavin Newsom survive where the LA Mayor did not because the former didn't lie about it? I think that was probably something to it, I think Newsom is just much smarter. Vila Ragosa is not very intelligent. He failed the California State Bar at least three times. He never did pass it to the best of my knowledge. He's not very bright. So I remember him speaking at Sinai Temple in Westwood. And it was Friday night live or like a thousand people in the audience. And he encouraged us all to go speak to someone who doesn't speak our language. How can you talk to someone who doesn't speak your language? All right. Presidential character. So James David Barber, political scientist from Duke, said that you could assess presidential character and predict how particular politicians might approach the White House job should they ever attain it. So Barber assessed presidents on two indices. First of all, whether they are positive or negative and you can apply this to your life too. You're primarily positive or negative and you're primarily active or passive in your ambition. So positive or negative in your outlook, active or passive in your ambition. So the first index, the positive negative one, assesses how presidents regard themselves in relation to the challenges of office. So how do you regard yourself in relation to the challenges of your job? All right. How do you embrace your job with joy, with optimism, what you regarded as a necessary martyrdom that you must go through to prove yourself worth? Okay. So that's the positive or negative in outlook. And then the second index is active versus passive. That measures the degree of wanting to accomplish big things or to retreat into an active governing mode. So if I want to keep my blog small, if I want to keep my live stream small, that's passive. All right. So I'm so passive in most of my life that my old friend James DeGiorgio, who I used to co-host a show with in the early days of podcasting, like 2003, 2004, used to have Jenna Jamison on the show. I remember once we had Jenna Jamison on the show and the sewage backed up and started flowing out of the bottom of my shower, like, into my apartment while I'm doing this live podcast interview with Jenna Jamison. And I explain what's happening. And Jenna says, oh, look, that's why you have such a negative outlook because you got all this sewage flowing through your apartment. That's why you're always so negative about people. I remember once I asked Jenna if I should become a rabbi. She said, yeah, you know, go for it. And then she ends up converting to Orthodox Judaism. I have not spoken to her in 20 years. And my friend, Kathy Sy, read my memoir, what was it called? Rebel Without a Shull. And she said, you read this and you wonder why you didn't settle down with Kendra Jade. So I was good friends with Kendra Jade for years. Did Kendra want to settle down and start a family with Luke? Have a couple of kids? I don't think so. I don't think so. We were friends, but I don't think she ever wanted to settle down with me. So she met, she was into rock stars. She was very well read. She was very smart, very well read. And I had kind of like a, a Ricardo-like relationship with Kendra because we fell out one point dramatically. And she like publicly turned against me. She thought that, that I just wanted to hurt people with my blog. She said, you know, I used to like you because I felt like we were both rebels against the industry, but now you've become really negative and I just think you get off on hurting people. Presidential character. What's my position on fake breasts? I think some women look better with fake breasts and some women don't. And Glib says, I reckon Kathy Saib's daughter has not spoken to Luke since her mother's death. Well, Kathy Saib's daughter, Maya, was on my show about a month ago. So I had her on for about half an hour. You can watch it. She's there. Full video, audio, everything. She was on the show a month ago. So I've stayed in touch with Maya. Kathy Saib's daughter. Okay. So in the chat, describe whether you're positive or negative in your outlook. So do you regard your job with joyful optimism or is it a necessary martyrdom that you must endure to support your family to pay the bills? And the second index, are you active or passive? Do you want to accomplish big things in your life or do you just want to react? Okay. So the active positive. These are presidents with big national ambitions who are self-confident, flexible, optimistic. Now, there's no, there never has been to the best of my knowledge any enmity between myself and Maya. So the active positive. Anyone in the chat, are you an active positive? These are people with big national ambitions who are self-confident, flexible, optimistic, joyful in the exercise of power, possessing a certain philosophical detachment toward what they regard as a great game. Then there's the active negative. Did Luke feud with Kathy? What's the background there? So I like Kathy, but Kathy wanted more from our relationship than just friends. So she wanted romance, et cetera, and I just wanted to be friends. So Kathy sought more in the relationship so she would just periodically get really angry with me and cut me off. And she was angry with me when she died. Like she deliberately cut me out, didn't want me to be a poor bearer at her funeral because she loathed all my girlfriends, just heated them with a passion. I remember once I told her, oh, you've spoiled me for other women because I so enjoyed our conversations with Kathy. And she said, that's truer than you know. So, yeah, Kathy was in love with me and wanted more from the relationship than I could give. So I just wanted to keep it on a friend's basis. Not to mention the fact that she was dying of lung cancer pretty much the whole time that I knew her. So she would just periodically blow up at me and cut me off. I mean, last time I saw her, I went to see her in the hospital, I think a few days before she died. And she was just mad at me. Just ordering me around and nothing I could do was right. Like the chair that I sat in was not right and I didn't pull up the right chair. And so, yeah, my last interaction, she was just furious with me. So she'd periodically get furious. I remember being weirded out by some of the blogging Luke did about him and Kathy. So, yeah, we had an intense relationship and she was volatile. So my understanding of myself is that I was consistent. I really enjoyed hanging out with Kathy. So she invited me to all the cool places. So other people saw her as adopting me like a stray dog. So when she went to dinner at Eugene Volek's house, he writes the Volek conspiracy as a law professor at UCLA. Like she brought me as her plus one. And we got in the car and she asked me, what's double anal? I think I'd written something about double anal on my blog. So I had to tell her that it's the insertion of two male appendages in a particular female orifice. She was horrified, but she was both horrified and wanted to know all about it. So she would periodically get mad at me because I didn't bring her flowers. And what does a girl have to do to get flowers around here? She'd periodically invite me over for dinner or we'd watch movies. And then we'd constantly blog about each other. She never asked me to teach her how to do double anal. She thought it was repulsive, but fascinating. I remember once we went to this Wednesday morning club and I wrote about how I was sitting with her and another middle-aged woman. And she really didn't like that. She really got mad at me. And so we would often go to an event, a party or social gathering, and then kind of write competing blog posts about it and about each other. And she said, never again mention that she's middle-aged. So I remember going to one party and some new friend of ours starts talking about the horrors of having lung cancer or something. And she had no idea that Kathy was like stage four. So Kathy's side died at age 47. So I think that was in 2007. So I was 14 years ago. I would have been about 40. So Kathy was about eight years older than me. So I can't get romantically involved with someone who was older than me. Yeah, she didn't like me mentioning that she was middle-aged. Let's see if that comes up. Found it here. So this is how I used to write about Kathy. 12 out of 5, I see Kathy Sypes, Kathy Sype, who complains I don't link to her. She walks in wearing a flimsy green dress. If she was showing any more flesh, she'd star in VH1's Centipede Balblance. So I had this thing where I just kind of berated for dressing immodestly on my blog. Kathy, I yell. She reluctantly gives up her place at the table with the big money folks and sits with me in the plebeian seats at the back. We're joined by a blonde boy crazy TV producer, Marie, who suggests I eat my salad. The salad has mushrooms. I don't like mushrooms. I say, Marie nudges Kathy. Why don't you take off his onions? No, and I'm not going to wipe off his ass either, says Kathy, which I thought was a vulgar remark considering the elevated surroundings and company. So this is at the Wednesday morning club. Marie says, I would never date a man who is a vegetarian because it would mean he's a fanatic. Kathy looks a vegetarian who doesn't like vegetables. Watching Marie eat is an erotically charged experience. Marie's the first woman to boss me around and make me like it. David Horowitz stands 5'8 and exudes non-erotic energy. James Woolsey is the speaker. He's younger and tanner than I expected and funnier. Kathy says she's noticed on my website a descent into insanity the past month. She doesn't know if reduce my daily lithium intake from 1200 milligrams a day to 300 milligrams. I wanted to lose that extra 20 pounds I've gained since starting on the medication in the spring. Seems that most people prefer me at the 1200 milligram mark. And so I would write about Kathy. Kathy would write about me and then Kathy's daughter, Maya would write on a blog about both of us. Good times. Okay, I was, yeah. So I got thrown out of one, two, three Orthodox synagogues. And I finally found a fourth Orthodox synagogue towards like the fall of 2001. But the rabbi put me on probation. I could only attend prayer services. I couldn't attend any of the social gatherings. Even though I'd quit writing on the porn industry. I'd just been banned from three Orthodox synagogues. And so the rabbi put me on probation. And then, and then I finally got off probation after about six months. And at a social gathering I said some things that were inappropriate. And it got back to the rabbi and he pulled me aside and talked to me about it. And so I went to my psychiatrist and I told him about what happened. And what would happen was I used to kind of balance between euphoria and despair. So I wasn't quite bipolar, but I had some tendencies in that direction. So I'd balance between euphoria and despair. And so my psychiatrist kind of picked up on that. He said, why don't we try you, why don't we try you on some lithium? And lithium was great. It would just even me out. But I had the side effect is I drool and I put on a lot of weight. And it gave a certain metallic odor to my skin. So I would try to take as little lithium as possible to avoid acting out, but take as little as possible so I wouldn't gain weight and become really pudgy. And I remember I was at an Orthodox Jewish conversion class and I was sitting next to this fairly hot Latina woman. And her skin smelled really good. It smelled tropical. And so I'm there in this conversion class and I'm like running my hand up and down like her inner thigh in my conversion class. And I think as I come out of there, I realize something's wrong. I'm approaching the euphoric topside and my bipolar cycle. I'd better go back on the lithium. When I start feeling like there are no consequences or anything I say or do, that's when I'd go back on the lithium. Lib Medley says, I remember when my mom got on Prezac decided to stop taking lithium. That was a bad scene. Yeah, lithium is wonderful. Oh, man. Kathy Sype. Those were good times. Okay, presidential character by James Barber. Great book. First came out in 1972. Okay, so the active positive. Let me know if you're an active positive. Presidents with big national ambitions who are self-confident, flexible, optimistic, joyful in the exercise of power, possessing a certain philosophical detachment toward what they regard as a great game. Then there's the, this is like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Then there's the active negative president, compulsive people with low self-esteem, seekers of power as a means of self-actualization, given to rigidity and pessimism, driven, overly aggressive. They harbor big dreams of bringing about accomplishments of large historical scope. So when I heard about this, I thought, this is me in college. This is how I thought of myself. Compulsive, low self-esteem, seeking power as a means of self-actualization, seeking power as a way to feel better about myself, given to rigidity and pessimism. Yes, that's me. Driven, sometimes overly aggressive, harboring big dreams for bringing about accomplishments of large historical scope. So I heard this and I thought, wow, that's me. I'm an active negative. So this is, active negative refers to people like Richard Nixon and Donald Trump. So Donald Trump's an active negative, a compulsive person with low self-esteem, seeks power as a way to feel better about himself, given to rigidity and pessimism, this American carnage, driven, sometimes overly aggressive. Harbour big dreams for bringing about accomplishments of large historical scope. And there's the passive positive personality. So these are compliant presidents who react to events rather than initiating them. This is someone like Joe Biden. They want to be loved. So Joe Biden wants to be loved. They are ingratiating and easily manipulated. Joe Biden, they are superficially optimistic. They harbour generally modest ambitions for their presidential years. This is Joe Biden, Harbour's modest ambitions. But they are healthy in both ego and self-esteem. Then the passive negative, these refer to withdrawn politicians with low self-esteem, little zest for the give and take of politics, the glad handing requirements of the game. They avoid conflict. They take no joy in the uses of power. They tend to get themselves boxed up through a preoccupation with principles, rules and procedures. So this is Barack Obama. He's a passive negative. So Joe Biden, passive positive. Barack Obama, passive negative. We're drawn politician. That was Obama. He's quite withdrawn. Low self-esteem, little zest for the give and take of politics, had no interest in the glad handing requirements of the game. He would avoid conflict. He took no joy in the exercise of power and he would get himself boxed up with a preoccupation with principles, rules and procedures. So Barbara, James David Barber, he identified George Washington as a passive negative, meaning he had low self-esteem. He shunned opportunities for taking power. He retreated from conflict, was generally preoccupied on small matters at the expense of big ambitions. And Barbara characterised Ronald Reagan as a passive positive, that his famous optimism was superficial, that he reacted to events rather than initiated them and was easily manipulated. Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Milhouse Nixon were clearly active negatives, as were Herbert Hoover and Woodrow Wilson. Active positives include Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman. Okay. So, Trump is a man of large ambitions. As president, he resolved to take the country in a whole new direction in a whole host of areas such as immigration, trade, foreign affairs. He was active president in his resolve, which was often expressed in audacious times. He wanted to change American society in very significant ways. So, positive presidents relish their job and the grand necessity to move events by persuading, cajoling, bargaining and occasionally threatening other players in the political arena. So, the great active presidents all had fun in the job. They showed zest and enthusiasm that was infectious, not just with the American people, but with members of Congress. This does not describe Donald Trump. There was no look of the happy warrior about him. Rather, there was a consistent bitterness and whininess. Trump demonstrated hardly any zest or enthusiasm for the job. He had very little enthusiasm for dealing with other people, with cajoling, influencing and outmaneuvering the political opposition. So, he seldom outmaneuvered his adversaries at all. And no president in American history has done more to make the big issues of the day about himself and his fate rather than about the nation and its fate. So, this is a giveaway that is struggles driven by internal motivations, by internal demons. So, this is why Trump was unable to build on his basic base of support. Approximately 40% of Americans would give him a positive rating. So, if there's one thing his political style was not, it's infectious, right? His negativity was a barrier to expanding his public support and his inability to expand his public support limited his success in governance and his lack of success in governance prevented him from political success in getting re-elected. So, Trump seems to be an active negative. Presidents in this category don't tend to have great track record awards. They include John Adams, a failed one-termer, Woodrow Wilson, a two-termer, but whose second term was the most disastrous of our history. Herbert Hoover tossed out after a single term because he couldn't grapple with the Great Depression. Lyndon Johnson, foreign policy failure of red dimension and Richard Nixon, the only president to resign the office in disgrace. So, if Trump had gotten re-elected, it very likely would have found a way to get impeached or very possibly resign. So, Biden's been on the national political scene for 50 years. He's positive because he loves to work with other people. He was excoriated recently for working with segregationist senators 50 years ago. We didn't agree on much of anything, said Biden, but we got things done. So, Biden has shined an ability to work with his Senate colleagues. He would work with Republicans. He'd work with segregationists. He'd work with everyone. He was able to maintain lines of communication with all groups, and that made him a key vote on the Foreign Relations Committee. So, even after 30 years in the Senate, J. Biden still exhibits the drive and passion of his youth, says the book Politics in America. So, passion. Positives are filled with passion. So, if you have passion, you've got a positive orientation for life. Positives demonstrate a zest for the job. They are open to people, even those in the opposition, who represent impediments to success, and they enjoy dealing with people through persuasion, cagellery, back slapping, old-fashioned horse trading. Positives love the game. J. Biden loves the game of politics. On the active-passive scale, J. Biden tilts toward passivity. So, his long Washington service reveals an adroit legislative politician who deals with issues as they emerge. There's not much evidence of vision with J. Biden. There's not much big thinking with J. Biden. So, Biden represents a passive-positive president. So, presidents in this category, they want to be loved. They are ingratiating, and they are easily manipulated. So, this is one of the knocks on Biden by conservatives that he's being manipulated in his campaign. And he'll continue to be manipulated by his party's left-wing radicals. So, J. Biden passive-positive versus Donald Trump, probably an active-negative. So, what did Robert Mary say about Barack Obama? So, Mary says of the country's 44 presidents, he wrote this in July of 2020, 13 were serious war presidents. Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, and Obama inherited wars. The rest initiated them. So, Mary says the five greatest war presidents were FDR, Franklin Delano, Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley in the Spanish-American War, James Polk in the Mexican War. And he even nominates here Nixon and Vietnam. It's interesting. So, Mary wrote a book, Where They Stand, where he assesses all the American presidents. How will history assess Barack Obama? So, Robert Mary wrote this in 2017. And Mary says history will assess Obama as a middling president. He didn't accomplish much, and some of what he did accomplish was a problem. He led the country through turbulent times without letting it slip into crisis, to deep recessions, debilitating scandals, violent street demonstrations, innovating wars, and unleash powerful waves of political opprobrium and get harsh judgments from history. Obama's first term was a mild success, hence his 2012 reelection. His second term was a mild failure. At the time of Obama's reelection, his Affordable Care Act was not yet seen as the fiasco it later became. He could argue he extricated America from the Iraq War, but he allowed the rise of ISIS. It's not clear how much Middle East chaos ensued from his mindless decision to help overthrow Muammar, Gaddafi, and Libya. He claimed credit for getting America through the harrowing economic downturn he inherited from George Bush, but he failed to generate the kind of economic growth that normally follows such recessions. History does not give high ratings to presidents who can't generate economic growth above 2% over multiple years, or who get the country into foreign policy struggles that seem to have no end. The Islamist terrorist threat in Europe and America appears more ominous today than it did when Barack Obama took office. Obama's middling performance can be attributed to three leadership characteristics. His audacity in behalf of outmoded thinking, his inability to build or even conceive of any kind of new coalition for a new era, and his underlying perception of America as a fallen nation. So Obama intended to become a president of rare consequence, a Ronald Reagan. So he said early on that Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America while Bill Clinton did not. So he saw presidential greatness. Obama did as setting the nation on a new course. That only happens when the country understands that the status quo is not working. So Obama said about the Republicans under Reagan that they were the party of ideas. And then he noted that in his own time the GEP had run out of ideas. Where Obama went wrong is that he tried to go back to the solutions of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. So big government programs, ever greater consolidation of power at the federal level. So this is a policy mix from a dead era. So his audacity was usually employed on behalf of tired or nostrums, not on behalf of any fresh thinking or new coalition building. His Affordable Care Act was highly unpopular. His cap and trade energy bill never got past the Senate. And his Dodd-Frank financial regulation legislation roiled the market in unforeseen ways. Never brought in any new voters into the camp. He wasn't able to build coalitions. He just stood up tremendous opposition. He had a view of America as a fallen nation. He couldn't build a political edifice that his successors would have to respect. Consider the contrast with Reagan. When Bill Clinton took office, he identified one of his aims as repeal of Reaganism. He tried and Bill Clinton had his head handed to him by the American people in the 1994 election. Thereafter, in a nod to Reagan, Clinton acknowledged the era of big government is over, so Reaganism lived on. So Obama will go down in the middle ranks of American presidents along with Benjamin Harrison, Martin Van Buren, Chester Arthur, and Rutherford B. Hayes.