According to Lichtman’s assessment, Bush currently can claim the eight keys necessary to win. (Bush has “Keys” 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 11 and 13.) The four “Keys” Bush loses are 6, 7, 10 and 12. “Key” nine is still unclear. According to the US Dept. of Commerce Bush gets key #6 as well.
As to key #7, I would find it hard to believe that anyone could say our foreign policy regarding terrorism is not the result of "major policy changes". This is in addition to reversing eight years of tax hikes.
I have to assume that professor Lichtman is swallowing the liberal Kool-aid when he says we have had major military or foreign policy failures. I'm not sure how conquering 2 countries in 2 years constitutes a failure. Doing this in spite of wide spread opposition makes this more of a success not less.
The graph is encouraging, but it contains some flaws that hamper it's percieved accuracy. I say percieved accuracy because the slope and amount of change in the graph has been exaggerated. For example, notice that between 0 and 26,260 is ONE graph unit, and 26,250 to 26,500 is also ONE unit. This is deliberately compiled in order to exaggerate the perception of the amount of change per unit on the X axis. This is called "suppression of the zero" . A more accurate and less misleading graph would have a linear scale to it. In essence, this graph shows us only the top 2 inches of columns that would be 10 feet long or more if the entire graph were shown.