numbers taken from a big picture perspective, they can actually give you a really interesting historical view about an empirically knowable question, whether or not presidents were liked. not after the fact, not because somebody lobbied you that a president was great in retrospect, but whether or not they were popular when they were president. whether or not people liked them when they served this office. here's the overall average approval ratings for presidents over the course of their whole presidencies. this is while they were in office. this is contemporaneous to the time that they were president. this is them graphed since world war ii. these are presidential approval ratings and ranked them from highest to lowest since world war ii. the far left, the guy with the biggest approval ratings, that's jfk. you can see right next to each other, sort of in the center to the right, that's george w. bush right next to richard nixon. they're almost exactly the same for the average approval ratings over the course of their whole presidencies. ford, carter, and truman