Worst. President. Ever.
December 2nd, 2006
Eric Foner, holder of an endowed chair in history at Columbia University, notes that Bush seems doomed for the category “Failure” - along with notable losers like Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Richard M. Nixon - in the annual straw poll of historians’ opinions on US Presidents. He explains why, and draws the obvious conclusion:
[Johnson and Buchanan:] Stubborn, narrow-minded, unwilling to listen to criticism or to consider alternatives to disastrous mistakes, they surrounded themselves with sycophants and shaped their policies to appeal to retrogressive political forces . . . . Even after being repudiated in the midterm elections of 1854, 1858 and 1866, respectively, they ignored major currents of public opinion and clung to flawed policies. Bush’s presidency certainly brings theirs to mind.
Harding and Coolidge are best remembered for the corruption of their years in office (1921-23 and 1923-29, respectively) and for channeling money and favors to big business. They slashed income and corporate taxes and supported employers’ campaigns to eliminate unions. Members of their administrations received kickbacks and bribes from lobbyists and businessmen. “Never before, here or anywhere else,” declared the Wall Street Journal, “has a government been so completely fused with business.” The Journal could hardly have anticipated the even worse cronyism, corruption and pro-business bias of the Bush administration.
ixon is mostly associated today with disdain for the Constitution and abuse of presidential power. Obsessed with secrecy and media leaks, he viewed every critic as a threat to national security and illegally spied on U.S. citizens. Nixon considered himself above the law.Bush has taken this disdain for law even further. [many, many examples deleted]
One other president bears comparison to Bush: James K. Polk. . . . Polk should be remembered primarily for launching that unprovoked attack on Mexico and seizing one-third of its territory for the United States.
Lincoln, then a member of Congress from Illinois, condemned Polk for misleading Congress and the public about the cause of the war — an alleged Mexican incursion into the United States. Accepting the president’s right to attack another country “whenever he shall deem it necessary,” Lincoln observed, would make it impossible to “fix any limit” to his power to make war. Today, one wishes that the country had heeded Lincoln’s warning.
[S]omehow, in his first six years in office [Bush] has managed to combine the lapses of leadership, misguided policies and abuse of power of his failed predecessors. I think there is no alternative but to rank him as the worst president in U.S. history.
But we knew that.
[NB: Sean Wilentz, of Princeton, arrived at the same conclusion earlier this year.]
UPDATE: It’s becoming a pile-on, and with little dissent.
Douglas Brinkley, Director of the Roosevelt Library, concurs, with some interesting and nuanced remarks as to why. (He thinks Bush will be partly vindicated for not having had much corruption in his administration - to which I can only ask why he overlooks Cheney obviously being on the take from Halliburton, the massive no-bid cronyism and overcharging on Iraq contracts, Cheney’s secret energy-business conference, and on and on. There’s also staggering ideological corruption - the repeated appointment of high officials whose mandate is to destroy the organizations they represent, and the bad-faith tactics used to stall emergency contraception and other women’s health issues at the FDA - to say nothing of the calculated lies and distortions that produced the Iraq fiasco and “homeland security” abuses. It is hard to think of a more fundamentally dishonest administration than this one.)
Looking on the bright side, Michael Lind, of the New America Foundation, insists that Bush is only the fifth-worst president in history - behind Andrew Johnson, Nixon, Madison (?!), and his pick for all-time worst: James Buchanan. (He puts Bush marginally above Nixon on grounds that his betrayal of the Constitution was aimed at suspected terrorists, “not at his personal and political opponents”, but here again he seems too kind, given the widespread crackdown on non-whites and progressive activists. He does say, rightly I’m sure, that Bush’s War and the Abu Ghraib photos will take their place alongside the worst of historical American atrocities.)
David Greenberg of Rutgers thinks that Bush’s abuses are of the same kind as Nixon’s, but that Nixon’s were more flagrantly illegal - and so he falls below Bush, but in part because we still don’t know the full story on Bush.
Aside from these particular comments and rankings, one interesting point is Brinkley’s off-hand comment that the question whether Bush will be the worst president in history is a common topic of conversation among historians. Not where Bush will be ranked but simply whether he will be the absolute worst. (He cites the dissenting opinion of Ronald Reagan’s biographer - whose objection is simply that it is too early to tell, not that he actually believes Bush is a good president.) That by itself speaks volumes.
Categories: General, News & Current Events, Politics | 4 Comments
