No, it’s not a sitcom–it’s today’s editorial section in the Washington Post.
WaPo’s editors handed out homework asgingments to a bevy of history professors. The assignment? Answer the question of whether Bush is the worst president of all time.
Eric Foner says yes:
Historians are loath to predict the future [Apparently not too loath-Ed.]. It is impossible to say with certainty how Bush will be ranked in, say, 2050. But somehow, in his first six years in office he 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.
The good news, apparently is that the consensus of the historians writing for the paper today is that he isn’t the worst, just close. For example, Douglas Brinkley has him sharing space not-quite-at-the-bottom with Herbert Hoover:
Though Bush may be viewed as a laughingstock, he won’t have the zero-integrity factors that have kept Nixon and Harding at the bottom in the presidential sweepstakes. Oddly, the president whom Bush most reminds me of is Herbert Hoover, whose name is synonymous with failure to respond to the Great Depression. When the stock market collapsed, Hoover, for ideological reasons, did too little. When 9/11 happened, Bush did too much, attacking the wrong country at the wrong time for the wrong reasons. He has joined Hoover as a case study on how not to be president.
Meanwhile, David Greenberg’s piece is entitled “At Least He’s Not Nixon” and Michael Lind places him at fifth worst.
The most positive assessment is from Vincent J. Cannato
So, case closed? Not yet. I long ago learned to look with suspicion when members of the left-leaning historical profession delve into contemporary politics or profess near unanimity. Today’s pronouncements that Bush is the “worst president ever” are too often ideology masquerading as history.Historical and popular judgments about presidents are always in flux. Dwight D. Eisenhower used to be considered a banal and lazy chief executive who embodied the “conformist” 1950s. Today, his reputation has improved because of more positive appraisals of his Cold War stewardship. Ronald Reagan, whom many historians dismissed as an amiable dunce, has also had his stock rise. On the flip side, Bill Clinton’s presidency looks somewhat different after Monica Lewinsky, the bursting of the dot-com bubble and 9/11 than it did in 1997.
By evoking” left-leaning” Cannato distracts from the actual job of evaluating. While it may well be that ideology or partisanhship clouds this discussion, the way to deal with it is by offering counter-evidence, not by crying “leftist.”
Still, Cannato is right: it is really too soon to answer this question. While it is radically unlikely anything is going to happen in the next two years to catapult Bush to the top of the list, it is hardly a foregone conclusions that he is even in the bottom five, let alone the worst president of all time. You’d think that historians, of all people, would have a little more historical perspective on the way these things tend evolve.
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December 3rd, 2006 at 4:17 pm
I think as the years go by, Bush will be considered far worse than he already has. Rove, Rice, and many others will start talking and writing books about their experience and my guess is that it will not be kind.
December 3rd, 2006 at 5:09 pm
Since when is History a left leaning field of study?
Isn’t it generally accepted that the hard sciences, history, and economics are the “conservative” fields?
December 3rd, 2006 at 5:18 pm
Joe,
The hard sciences it is hard to say. Moreso in Economics, but in history, no.
December 4th, 2006 at 8:06 am
I find those historians’ findings very odd, personally. In my history classes (and between undergrad and grad I’ve taken almost every Am. history our university offers) I was never taught that Nixon was the worst President, although many of these historian act like he is a “gimme” in that category.
I recall my history professors pointing to Presidents like Warren Harding, Andrew Johnson and even Ulysses Grant (possibly because of southern prejudices, but he did have a corrupt administration) as candidates for the worst president ever.
I’m sure history will not be kind to Dubya, but we really can’t be sure right now.