 Bush America’s historians, it seems, don’t think much of George W. Bush.
Now in all fairness, historians should wait a while before passing
judgment on a president’s who served recently, much less one still in
office. But the current incumbent is a special case. After all, 81
percent of Americans, according to a recent New York Times poll,
believe he’s taken the country on the wrong track. That’s the highest
number ever registered. The same poll also says 28 percent have a
favorable view of his performance in office, which is also in
Nixon-in-the-darkest-days-of-Watergate territory.
But, as George Mason University’s History News Network reports, the
historians have a different measure. They want to stack him up against
his thirty-three predecessors as the nation’s chief executive. Among
historians, there is no doubt into which echelon he falls–his
competitors are Millard Fillmore, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and
Franklin Pierce, the worst of the presidential worst. But does Bush
actually come in dead last?
Yes. A Pew Research Center poll of 109 leading historians found that 61
percent of them rank Bush as “worst ever” among U.S. presidents. Bush’s
key competition comes from Buchanan, apparently, and a further 2
percent of the sample puts Bush right behind Buchanan as runner-up for
“worst ever.” 96 percent of the respondents place the Bush presidency
in the bottom tier of American presidencies. And was his presidency
(it’s a bit wishful to speak of his presidency in the past tense–after
all there are several more months left to go) a success or failure? On
that score the numbers are still more resounding: 98 percent label it a
“failure.”
Pew Research Poll: Historians Rate George W. Bush a “Failure”
This marks a dramatic deterioration for Bush. Previously he wasn’t
viewed in the most positive terms, but there was a consensus that he
wasn’t the “worst of the worst” either. That was in the spring of 2004.
In the meantime, Bush has established himself as the torture president,
the basis for his invasion of Iraq has been exposed as a fraud, the
Iraq War itself has gone disastrously, the nation’s network of
alliances has faded, and the economy has gone into a tailspin–not to
mention the bungled handling of relief for victims of hurricane
Katrina. In 2004, only 12 percent of historians were ready to place
Bush dead last.
Here are some of the comments that the historians furnished:
“No individual president can compare to the second Bush,” wrote one.
“Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors
his deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country
with his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on
the Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the
terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a
looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world’s
goodwill. In short, no other president’s faults have had so deleterious
an effect on not only the country but the world at large.”
“With his unprovoked and disastrous war of aggression in Iraq and his
monstrous deficits, Bush has set this country on a course that will
take decades to correct,” said another
historian. “When future historians look back to identify the moment at
which the United States began to lose its position of world leadership,
they will point—rightly—to the Bush presidency. Thanks to his policies,
it is now easy to see America losing out to its competitors in any
number of areas: China is rapidly becoming the manufacturing powerhouse
of the next century, India the high tech and services leader, and
Europe the region with the best quality of life.”
harpers.org
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