Rolling Stone Mag - The Worst President in History?

[realFedUp]

{Sean Wilentz is professor of history and director of the Program in American Studies at Princeton University. }

Rolling Stone
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/profile/story/9961300/the_worst_president_in_history?rnd=1145487163682&has-player=true&version=6.0.12.1040

April 21, 2006

The Worst President in History?
Sean Wilentz

One of America's leading historians assesses George W. Bush

Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a "failure." Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration's "pursuit of disastrous policies."
In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton -- a category in which Bush is the only contestant.

The lopsided decision of historians should give everyone pause. Contrary to popular stereotypes, historians are generally a cautious bunch. We assess the past from widely divergent points of view and are deeply concerned about being viewed as fair and accurate by our colleagues. When we make historical judgments, we are acting not as voters or even pundits, but as scholars who must evaluate all the evidence, good, bad or indifferent. Separate surveys, conducted by those perceived as conservatives as well as liberals, show remarkable unanimity about who the best and worst presidents have been.

Historians do tend, as a group, to be far more liberal than the citizenry as a whole -- a fact the president's admirers have seized on to dismiss the poll results as transparently biased. One pro-Bush historian said the survey revealed more about "the current crop of history professors" than about Bush or about Bush's eventual standing. But if historians were simply motivated by a strong collective liberal bias, they might be expected to call Bush the worst president since his father, or Ronald Reagan, or Nixon. Instead, more than half of those polled -- and nearly three-fourths of those who gave Bush a negative rating -- reached back before Nixon to find a president they considered as miserable as Bush.
The presidents most commonly linked with Bush included Hoover, Andrew Johnson and Buchanan. Twelve percent of the historians polled -- nearly as many as those who rated Bush a success -- flatly called Bush the worst president in American history. And these figures were gathered before the debacles over Hurricane Katrina, Bush's role in the Valerie Plame leak affair and the deterioration of the situation in Iraq. Were the historians polled today, that figure would certainly be higher.

snip

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.

continued

[kaygore]

1. This is a great read

Thank you!

[rodeodance]

10. says one of his main problems is that he is divider! yes, yes

...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.

* * * *

THE CREDIBILITY GAP

No previous president appears to have squandered the public's trust more than Bush has. In the 1840s, President James Polk gained a reputation for deviousness over his alleged manufacturing of the war with Mexico and his supposedly covert pro-slavery views. Abraham Lincoln, then an Illinois congressman, virtually labeled Polk a liar when he called him, from the floor of the House, "a bewildered, confounded and miserably perplexed man" and denounced the war as "from beginning to end, the sheerest deception." But the swift American victory in the war, Polk's decision to stick by his pledge to serve only one term and his sudden death shortly after leaving office spared him the ignominy over slavery that befell his successors in the 1850s. With more than two years to go in Bush's second term and no swift victory in sight, Bush's reputation will probably have no such reprieve.

The problems besetting Bush are of a more modern kind than Polk's, suited to the television age -- a crisis both in confidence and credibility. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam travails gave birth to the phrase "credibility gap," meaning the distance between a president's professions and the public's perceptions of reality. It took more than two years for Johnson's disapproval rating in the Gallup Poll to reach fifty-two percent in March 1968 -- a figure Bush long ago surpassed, but that was sufficient to persuade the proud LBJ not to seek re-election. Yet recently, just short of three years after Bush buoyantly declared "mission accomplished" in Iraq, his disapproval ratings have been running considerably higher than Johnson's, at about sixty percent. More than half the country now considers Bush dishonest and untrustworthy, and a decisive plurality consider him less trustworthy than his predecessor, Bill Clinton -- a figure still attacked by conservative zealots as "Slick Willie."

[CanuckAmok]

2. I don't even think he's the best since Clinton.

There are as-yet undiscovered single-cell life-forms frozen 600 miles below the polar ice of Pluto which could govern more effectively.

[Jim Sagle]

3. The shit I took this morning could govern more effectively.

[Cha]

4. Yep, with an enemy like

like himself..bush didn't need any more. he is his own worst adversary.

[SharonAnn]

5. Outstanding article! Thanks for posting it.

[ShortnFiery]

6. Yes, thank-you :-) eom

[muriel_volestrangler]

7. And that's without considering the torture centres

at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, and maybe elsewhere; or the massive corruption in the 'reconstruction' of Iraq; or the handing of energy policy to Enron and Exxon. There's just too much illegality, immorality and incompetence in the Bush regime to be able to fit it into one article.

[realFedUp]

8. exactamente....nt

[rodeodance]

9. Can anyone upload the Front cover--would love to circulate it. Thanks

in advance

[Lisa0825]

11. Here ya go....

[chalky]

12. Why in hell did they end that title with a question mark? n/t

[Rechan]

13. Look at that...

A use for that magazine.

[JPZenger]

14. Many parallels of deceipt in war

There are many parallels in US history where deceit was used to persuade the public to go to war for the wrong reasons.

In the Mexican-American War, we placed US troops at a spot along the Rio Grande where we knew they would be attacked.

In the Spanish-American War, we used an explosion on a US warship to justify taking over Cuba and the Phillipines. The cause of the explosion is still unknown, but may have been accidental.

In the War of 1812, we used British kidnapping of US sailors and supposed British support of Indian attacks to justify our attempt to take over Canada.

[Vitruvius]

15. Kick

:kick:

[complain jane]

16. So glad this was here... I almost posted on this just now

in a dupe thread.