The man and the moment -- The politics of capture -- Continuity and collusion -- Missing a rendezvous with reform -- Crony capitalism -- Obama's loyal opposition -- Political malpractice -- Change we can believe in

In this paper we show that findings of an apparently instable popularity function of U.S. presidents, as reported in the previous literature, are likely the consequence of the common use of linear estimation techniques. Employing Penalized Spline Smoothing in the context of Additive Mixed Models...