[Vision2020] Historians Rank President Bush

[nickgier at adelphia.net]

Tulane’s Douglas Brinkley leads off by arguing that Bush ranks as merely the third-worst, tied with Herbert Hoover but still behind Warren G. Harding and Richard Nixon for the top (bottom) spot.

Michael Lind thinks Bush is even better than that, as he votes for Bush as a solid No. 39, or fifth-worst, in the all-time rankings. Lind puts Bush behind “behind four other Oval Officers whose policies were even more disastrous: James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Richard M. Nixon and James Madison.” (James Madison? That’s right: “Madison, the ‘Father of the Constitution,’ was a great patriot, a brilliant intellectual — and an absolutely abysmal president,” says Lind, mostly for Madison’s role in inviting the War of 1812 and the subsequent burning of the nation’s capital.

How about No. 42? Barring a catastrophic final two years for the Bush presidency, there’s no way Bush can beat Nixon’s dismal record, writes Rutgers historian David Greenberg.

University of Massachusetts in Boston historian Vincent J. Cannato makes the most positive case for Bush. He predicts that Bush will, like most presidents, “bequeath a mixed record” for historians to debate, but Cannato declines to rank him on the No. 1 to No. 43 spectrum. He says it’s too early to tell. (This seems to put Cannato close to the Jonathan Rauch position, which is that Bush may be only a merely bad president, and not a historically awful one.)

Columbia’s Eric Foner doesn’t feel the need to wait to deliver the verdict of history.

Foner paints Bush as a Frankenstein-like presidential supervillain, crafted from the most devilish components dug up from the graves of his most inept predecessors: Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Richard Nixon. Mysteriously (O.K., not so mysteriously), Foner declines to note that this would make Bush the Serpentor of terrible presidents, Serpenter being a “G.I. Joe” bad guy who was genetically engineered from the D.N.A. of history’s greatest dictators. Foner writes:

    Historians are loath to predict the future. 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.