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April 27, 2006
The Worst President in History
What could possibly qualify a president for the title of “worst in history”? The historian Sean Wilentz offers one answer in Rolling Stone. After painfully documenting Bush’s unpopularity with professional historians and general public alike, he puts the question:
"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."
Wilentz goes on to build an impressive case against Bush, from his failed war in Iraq to his inept domestic policies. He lays special stress on the notion that successful presidents “rally the nation” by reaching out across the ideological divide—unlike the man who farcically told us he was a “uniter, not a divider.” All of this is true, of course, but ist still does not quite explain Bush's uniquely dismal place in history.
Welintz is right that we honor the greats for the way they respond to crisis. Likewise, the forgettable failures: Buchanan and Hoover reside at the bottom because of their inability to act. But Bush has invented a whole new category of failure: He alone among the failed presidents is a visionary, an activist, a leader who radically changed policy in order to radically change the nation and the world.
This president has worked at being bad! A ravaged economy and a tinderbox world are his achievements, and his monstrous failure.
Posted by stevemack at April 27, 2006 08:46 PM
