Carter
Clinton
FDR
Andrew Johnson
LBJ
I'd move LBJ up a notch. But you are right.
Posted on 01/01/2008 11:14:40 AM PST by K-oneTexas
Our Worst President Ever? By Victor Davis Hanson From the November/December 2007 Issue The American
That’s what some on both left and right are saying about George W. Bush. Don’t count him out yet, VICTOR DAVIS HANSON advises.
Bush Geopolitics By October, 15 months before his presidency would end, George Bush’s approval ratings still hovered around 30 percent.
His administration will go down, say historians such as Columbia’s Eric Foner and Princeton’s Sean Wilentz, as a disaster. As Wilentz put it, “Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.”
A new genre in American popular culture has arisen comparing Bush to Hitler—on the Internet, and in fiction, stand-up comedy, and drama. To the radio personality Garrison Keillor, Bush’s Republicans are “brownshirts in pinstripes”—echoing Al Gore’s similar slur of “digital brownshirts.”
Even Bush’s supporters seem resigned to such abuse. They are talking not of a restoration in public esteem before the president leaves office, but rather of a Trumanesque turnaround: a once-despised president only years later becomes appreciated for his unpopular but necessary decisions.
But for now, Bush seems to have an orphaned presidency defended by very few. From the left, he is criticized for his tax cuts for the rich, his lack of concern for African-American victims of Katrina, his illiberal homeland-security measures—and always for Iraq, with shrill, persistent choruses of “preemption” and “unilateralism.” Much of this anger against Bush is Pavlovian and superficial, deeply embedded within the president’s caricatured dead-or-alive, smoke-’em-out lingo.
As a result, the left gives the president no credit for policies that have irked his conservative base. In his first term, he increased federal spending at a faster rate than Bill Clinton. He extended the reach of federal education policy with his No Child Left Behind legislation, and he did not veto a single spending bill, instead sponsoring a major new prescription entitlement for Medicare recipients. His immigration bill, blasted by many conservatives, ultimately failed, but still won over Senator Ted Kennedy and infuriated red-state America.
So will Bush leave disgraced and confirm this prognosis of worst president? Probably not—and not merely because we have had far worse, from James Buchanan to Richard Nixon.
Even Bush’s supporters seem resigned to such abuse. They now talk not of a restoration in public esteem before the president leaves office, but rather of a Trumanesque turnaround sometime later.
Start with the fountainhead of Bushophobia— the postwar reconstruction of Iraq. The surge that began in June seems to be working far better than anticipated. Should such tactical progress translate into strategic success—the verdict is still out—historians may conclude that George Bush removed the two worst regimes in the Middle East, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, and then successfully battled al-Qaeda terrorists in both countries in his pursuit of democratic reform. History could further record that he accomplished this at far less the cost than the stalemate in Korea in the 1950s or the defeat in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s.
We also forget that the abuse heaped on past presidents while in office sometimes fades with perspective. A once-reviled Calvin Coolidge is generally assessed as a far better president than Lyndon Johnson. Ronald Reagan has been recently canonized, so we forget that during the Iran-Contra scandal there was talk of his impeachment. George H. W. Bush blew a 90 percent approval rating after the Gulf War and was blamed all through the 1990s for cynically not removing Saddam; now he is seen as a sober realist and globalist. Lauded today, Bill Clinton ended his tenure in disgrace.
The current stridency of Democratic presidential candidates is also starting to show Americans that easy criticism of a sitting president is not quite the same as assuming the responsibility of governing.
As the campaign wears on and exasperated Democrats continue to appeal to their base, the bystander president could be seen as a more sober and judicious statesman. And should a Republican candidate— all the frontrunners have more or less endorsed the president’s Middle East agenda—be elected, it will provide a lame-duck Bush with a type of national approval for yet a third time.
Similarly, few have offered alternatives to most of the Bush initiatives. Neoconservatism is slandered as messianic and dangerous in its advocacy of democratic reform. Are we then to revert to the amoral realism that tolerated Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, or winked as the House of Saud funded madrassas that empowered global jihad? Or should we treat terrorism as a “criminal justice” matter? We did that serially in the 1990s, from the first World Trade Center bombing to the attack on the USS Cole—and earned 9/11 as the logical outcome of such appeasement.
In short, should we avoid another 9/11, see North Korea denuclearize, stabilize Iraq and Afghanistan, or perhaps catch Dr. Zawihiri and bin Laden, while the economy stays strong and our southern border with Mexico is closed—all possible in the next year and a quarter—George Bush could still leave office with a successful presidency.
Victor Davis Hanson, a classics scholar, is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Seven out eight. Neither W nor the Democrats want border security.
Nope, GWB cannot outdo Carter ... still the hands-down winner of the worst President ever honor.
Carter
Clinton
FDR
Andrew Johnson
LBJ
You nailed it!
Bush lost me with the attempt to sell out the country to a third-world nation. Good luck on revising that.
Luckily America is not a democracy;
polls don't matter except to socialists.
Sorry, Mr. Hanson - you're wrong about this one.
His outrageous spending policies will prohibit any sort of fond reminising. For instance, the old folks who benefited from his “compassion” in the form of free pills will be long dead but the young, who will have to PAY for said freebies, will be around and won’t be as forgiving.
The winner of the title, “Worst President of My Lifetime” goes to Jimmah Carter by a unanimous vote of the RightWingConspirator family.
My view on why an effective solution for illegal imigration is so difficult to implement:
1) The Democrats don’t want Bush to get credit for ANYTHING!
2) The elements of the solution MUST NOT be racist.
3) There are truly difficult components;
- Deportation is not feasable,
- Letting them stay and then denying them access to education and medical care is a pretty tough policy to sign into law,
- We all benefit from the cheap labor, even if we don’t like it,
4) Just because I’m opposed to illegal imigrants being rewarded for their law breaking, doesn’t mean that I have a workable solution!
Carter
Clinton
FDR
Andrew Johnson
LBJ
I'd move LBJ up a notch. But you are right.
As far as Clinton ... his economy was fairly good. His personal character and the stain left on the White House because of it, will be a disgrace he brought on and it will always be there.
President Bush deserves much credit for sticking to his guns on Iraq. I don’t have his faith or trust in Iran or North Korea. I think he has resigned himself to the idea that there is not much he can do now about them. He also gave us Judge Roberts and Judge Alito. The birthing of Alito required a conservative midwife. The President’s primary fault outside his consist inability to as an administration make a case and defend itself against the left is that he tried to graft conservatism onto liberal institutions in the hope that the graft would eventually take over the whole. This compassionate conservatism did not work.
It left conservatives with no high ground on fiscal matters and it led us to the loss of the House and Senate. This can not be ignored. He and his lack of leadership in dealing with problems among elected Republicans left the door open for the radical left to return to power and it is only by their total ineptness and the wholesale bankrupt nature of their ideas that they have failed in their goals of dominating government. They took the spotlight, they tied their success to the failure of US interests and they are now reaping the rewards.
I think President Bush will be seen as a mixed bag politically and historically for some time. He is a man who could’ve led the charge against the left after 9-11 and united those who love America as Americans but he chose to sit back in his CEO chair and manage it like the diplomats who so horribly failed before 9-11. I’m proud that he took the fight to the enemy and refused to retreat from it. Not many would have had the courage to stand the barrage of a beating he did not always deserve.
That said I’m proud to have voted for him but I will not vote for another CEO president again. I will not vote for the compassionate conservative who thinks compassion is adopting liberal ideas and stamping them as conservative.
Not again. Not when there are other options. Not as long as one conservative is left standing and if there are none I would rather not vote at all if not for the plight of our troops who I would never cast into the hands of the left no matter how much I am disgusted with what Massachusetts and Arkansas has spit out for us to consider.
Reagan was a disaster too. I remember hearing that all the time. Made fun of him for being an actor.
Now the left’s buzzword is how dumb Bush is...people like MArty Sheen who didn’t make it out of high-school making fun of W who went to both Yale AND Harvard.
Too funny and so desperate.
As usual.
On 2nd thought, I’d move Clinton up a notch, too. The damage he did by his sellouts to the Chicoms hasn’t been revealed yet. I hope my sons don’t pay the price for his traitorous actions.
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