fired people, blah blah blah.' You're not buying that? Dubner: I buy that he believes that to be true. A lot of people have believed that to be true in the past; this kind of common idea of the last 10, 15 years is 'president as CEO.' But it doesn't work that way. We set it up to not work that way. When it comes to unilateral decision making, there's no comparison between what a CEO can do and what a president can try to get done. Here's another way of looking at it, with some actual data, which is what we like to do. Ryssdal: I was waiting for the data, man. Dubner: In the 2004 Bush-Kerry election, you may recall there was a little bit of a snafu concerning the early exit polls. Ryssdal: Oh yeah, Kerry was the winner for like, three-something hours, four hours? Dubner: That's exactly right. It was announced it was Kerry but it turned out to be Bush. And the economist Justin Wolfers took advantage of that mix-up for a study he did. Justin Wolfers: 2004 was a social scientist's dream. What you have is four hours -- I'm a Democrat, so I'll say four beautiful hours -- in which we basically had a Kerry presidency. And it was random. Dubner: So what Wolfers did is he looked at how the stock markets reacted to first the news of a Kerry presidency, and then the new -- turned out to be correct --