Is George W. Bush The Worst President In American History?

Princeton History Professor Sean Wilentz chimes in on what he thinks might be President George W. Bush's eventual place in history, and it ain't pretty. From Rolling Stone (via a heads-up from Slic[k]):

George W. Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.

The reason I think Bush will be remember as one of if not the worst of the American presidents is because of the deadly combination of (1) over-the-top incompetence, (2) supreme arrogance, and (3) unfortunate historical timing. Wilentz cites other examples of awful chief executives -- e.g., James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Herbert Hoover -- and explains why Bush will probably end up being the worst of that bunch:

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.

It's hard to argue with that, particularly when you add to the mix his inability to outright fire supremely incompetent people (Rumsfeld still has his job, and Condi Rice and Paul Wolfowitz were actually promoted).

And unfortunately for us, we've had this loser during a particularly calamitous time in our history. I'm not just talking about the 9-11 attacks. Global warming has already started wreaking havoc on this country as well as the rest of the world, and Bush has not only done nothing to slow it down -- his administration has actually attempted to cover up its very existence. Unless Bush is forced out of office -- or unless he has a change of heart in the next year or two -- this country will have wasted eight years by not dealing with an issue that even Bush's own Pentagon admits is the most dangerous security threat this country currently faces.

But let's get back to the whole 9-11 issue. After a promising initial response, Bush ultimately responded to 9-11 by . . . invading a country that had nothing to do with 9-11, and then doing it in the most incompetent way imaginable. The decision to invade Iraq will undoubtedly go down as the greatest American foreign policy blunder ever. We'll be feeling the effects of that mistake for decades to come.

And if all those colossal failures weren't enough, we also have the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the images related to BushCo's inept response to that particular catastrophe, images which are seared into the minds of people all over the world. I suspect that even folks around the world who hate Bush's America were horrified by the pictures of American citizens dying on their own streets and dead bodies floating in downtown New Orleans -- images which showed that the greatest nation in the history of the world may not be as great as everyone thought.

The problem is that everyone in this country knows that we are a lot better than what the images in the Katrina aftermath portrayed. Unfortunately, we are stuck with an enormously incompetent president who actually seems eager to destroy this country. Professor Wilentz makes this particular point very effectively in his article:

According to the Treasury Department, the forty-two presidents who held office between 1789 and 2000 borrowed a combined total of $1.01 trillion from foreign governments and financial institutions. But between 2001 and 2005 alone, the Bush White House borrowed $1.05 trillion, more than all of the previous presidencies combined. Having inherited the largest federal surplus in American history in 2001, he has turned it into the largest deficit ever -- with an even higher deficit, $423 billion, forecast for fiscal year 2006. Yet Bush -- sounding much like Herbert Hoover in 1930 predicting that "prosperity is just around the corner" -- insists that he will cut federal deficits in half by 2009, and that the best way to guarantee this would be to make permanent his tax cuts, which helped cause the deficit in the first place!

But Bush's biggest failure has to be the fact that he could have gone down as one of the greats -- history certainly presented such an opportunity to him -- but he was too stupid to follow a path that would have guaranteed him an honorable place in history. He instead decided to abandon the moderate tone he took during the 2000 campaign to become the most extreme American president ever. He'll have to live with that decision, but unfortunately, so will we.

Even folks like Thomas Friedman are starting to see the danger that Bush represents, particularly in the area of foreign policy:

I look at the Bush national security officials much the way I look at drunken drivers. I just want to take away their foreign policy driver's licenses for the next three years. Sorry, boys and girls, you have to stay home now -- or take a taxi. ... You will not be driving alone. Not with my car. * * *

If ours were a parliamentary democracy, the entire Bush team would be out of office by now, and deservedly so. ... But ours is not a parliamentary system, and while some may feel as if this administration's over, it isn't. So what to do? We can't just take a foreign policy timeout.

Anyway, read Wilentz's Rolling Stone article. It's excellent.

It's always fun to end one of these rants with a song, so here's a good one (thanks for the link, Fredrick).