George W Bush - Great Failure? Or Greatest Failure?
I'm a little late getting around to this, but the HNN Poll of historians ranking Bush's presidency is still a fun read.
Asked to rank the presidency of George W. Bush in comparison to those of the other 41 American presidents, more than 61 percent of the historians concluded that the current presidency is the worst in the nation’s history. Another 35 percent of the historians surveyed rated the Bush presidency in the 31st to 41st category, while only four of the 109 respondents ranked the current presidency as even among the top two-thirds of American administrations.
. . .
“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 area: 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.”
As I said, a fun read, but there is one point that gave me pause:
The reason for the hesitancy some historians had in categorizing the Bush presidency as the worst ever, which led them to place it instead in the “nearly the worst” group, was well expressed by another historian who said, “It is a bit too early to judge whether Bush's presidency is the worst ever, though it certainly has a shot to take the title. Without a doubt, it is among the worst.”
It got me thinking about a comment made by a southern Democratic friend about the results of the 2004 election.
He basically said that there was a silver lining to Kerry losing, because things were such a mess that it would be impossible for people to not shift some of the blame to the Democrats had he won. (How giving Bush another four years to screw things up even more was going to help the Democrats once they finally got in, he never got around to explaining.)
In any case, if by some miraculous combination of skill, luck, tenacity, and charisma, President Obama can manage to right the sinking economy and reverse the dwindling overseas influence of the US, will this have the effect of boosting Bush’s ranking because his failures didn’t result in a Depression or Civil War-sized disaster?
