FWIW my guess is that if you compare (lifetime impact of president):(lifetime impact of average member of congress), the ratio would be <100 (but >30).
I’m surprised you think that low, especially considering the President often will have been a Senator or Governor or top businessman before office, so the longer average term in Congress is not a big advantage.
I think I was leaning into making my guess sound surprising there, and I had in mind something closer to 100 than 30; it might have been better to represent it as “about 100” or “>50″ or something.
The fact that presidential terms are just 4 or 8 years does play into my thinking. For sure, they’ve typically done other meaningful stuff, but I don’t think that typically has such a high impact ratio as their years as president. I generated my ratio by querying my brain for snap judgements about how big a deal it would seem to have [some numbers of presidents] [do a thing over their career] vs [some fraction of congress].
Anyway I could certainly be wrong here. I think it’s possible I’m underestimating how big is the impact of having the mouthpiece of the presidency.
FWIW my guess is that if you compare (lifetime impact of president):(lifetime impact of average member of congress), the ratio would be <100 (but >30).
I’m surprised you think that low, especially considering the President often will have been a Senator or Governor or top businessman before office, so the longer average term in Congress is not a big advantage.
I think I was leaning into making my guess sound surprising there, and I had in mind something closer to 100 than 30; it might have been better to represent it as “about 100” or “>50″ or something.
The fact that presidential terms are just 4 or 8 years does play into my thinking. For sure, they’ve typically done other meaningful stuff, but I don’t think that typically has such a high impact ratio as their years as president. I generated my ratio by querying my brain for snap judgements about how big a deal it would seem to have [some numbers of presidents] [do a thing over their career] vs [some fraction of congress].
Anyway I could certainly be wrong here. I think it’s possible I’m underestimating how big is the impact of having the mouthpiece of the presidency.