Even though I know very little about other Presidents of the USA before Nixon (the Watergate hearings are one of my earliest memories), I still think Bush Jr has to be the worst. After all, the country was still standing when he got it, so no one else could have been worse, right?
So it’s nice to hear that many actual historians agree with my uninformed assessment. And better still, Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton, lays out the case.
What makes this better than the typical ‘Bush is bad’ article is that the authors uses past presidencies to make historical comparisons.
How does any president’s reputation sink so low? The reasons are best understood as the reverse of those that produce presidential greatness. In almost every survey of historians dating back to the 1940s, three presidents have emerged as supreme successes: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These were the men who guided the nation through what historians consider its greatest crises: the founding era after the ratification of the Constitution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second World War. Presented with arduous, at times seemingly impossible circumstances, they rallied the nation, governed brilliantly and left the republic more secure than when they entered office.
Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties — Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush — have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures — an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.
One quote that got me thinking:
No two-term president since polling began has fallen from such a height of popularity as Bush’s (in the neighborhood of ninety percent, during the patriotic upswell following the 2001 attacks) to such a low (now in the midthirties).
Do you think that people’s opinion of the President has more to do with external factors, like whether they feel happy or not, rather than whether they agree with his policies? Sort of like your favourite album or something.
23 April 2006 at 5:19 pm
No I don’t think so – I think he has shown himself to be incompetent, a liar, weak and therefore easily manipulated, and out of touch with ordinary people and their concerns (Katrina kinda underscored that). And I think that however sheltered Americans are from a perspective of the world, they are not stupid. My experience of Americans is that they are mostly extremely nice, honest and decent people – naive to the extreme – and they like to have a president who reflects that, like Reagan for example. Dubya is so obviously a slimeball douchebag that he’s become an embarrassment to ordinary Americans.
(the word verification is ninys, amazingly close to the british insult ‘ninny’ for an incompetent idiot.)