Ten Worst Presidents: Introduction
Is George W. Bush's presidency shaping up to be one of the worst in U.S. history? You hear the question being asked more and more these days. And more and more, you hear the same answer. With Iraq a shambles and trust in the administration declining, it is probably not surprising that 54 percent of respondents in a recent USA Today/Gallup survey said that history would judge Bush a below-average or poor president, more than twice the number who gave such a rating to any of the five preceding occupants of the White House, including Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, including Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.
Public opinion is a notoriously fickle beast, of course, which is why historians, political scientists, and other custodians of the long view usually prefer to reserve judgment until they can speak of their subjects in the past tense. But clearly there is something about Bush II—or possibly the overheated climate of contemporary national politics—that has inspired many historians to abandon their usual caution. Meena Bose, a Hofstra University political scientist who has written about presidential ratings, says that the scholars' rush to rank the current president comes out of an acute awareness of the long-term consequences of his policies. "Since it's hard to see how Iraq will work out for the better," Bose says, " it's hard not to pass judgments."
Whatever his reasons, Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz created a minor sensation last year when he published a resounding verdict in Rolling Stone magazine: "Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 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." Wilentz's bill of particulars was not surprising: the quagmire in Iraq, "monster" deficits, the inadequate response to the Katrina disaster, and assorted arguable abuses of presidential power. But that he would so fully abandon the historian's distrust of "presentism" was a bit of a surprise. Bush partisans had a ready explanation for that assessment: liberal bias. But while Wilentz makes no secret of his liberalism, he referred to pointed out that his was not a lonely voice in the history crowd. He cited an informal survey of 415 historians in 2004 in which 81 percent of the respondents stated that the Bush administration would go down as a failure.Later, a cluster of article in the Washington Post asked whether Bush would rank among the worst presidents, and four out of five of the participating historians made a case that he would.
I fear that we are getting too far into the Bush presidency, which takes us off trackSo was there something more than partisan bias at work here? Bush loyalists don't think so. Giving voice to what many of them believe, one dissident among the History News Network respondents opined that the results would reveal more about the liberal-left bias of today's professoriat than they would about Bush's performance in relation to that of other occupants of the White House. And even one of the instigators of the survey, historian Robert McElvaine of Millsapps College, conceded that it was too early to make meaningful comparisons.
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