Matt Yglesias riffed off of Harry Reid's statement that Bush is the worst President ever and challenged it rather lamely.
Mark Schmitt has posted a great response:
[W]hat makes Bush so disturbing is exactly the degree to which he is not at all like "run-of-the- mill, parties- alternate-in- power" conservative. It's recklessness, the corruption, the short-sightedness that characterizes this administration, not conservatism. I could live in a world where conservative restraint alternates in power with liberal over-ambition, reaching a dialectic of moderate social policy, as perhaps can be said to have occurred in some Western European countries, or in the U.S. in the 60s/70s/80s. But that's not what we have here.
Bush "somewhat better than Ronald Reagan"? I don't think so. I have a certain - limited - respect for Reagan, some of it developed after his presidency. As a model for one kind of presidency - the person of a few strong principles who leaves implementation to others - he had an admirable sense of his own strengths and limits. His 1981 budget cuts were not devastating and while he cut taxes that year, he also increased them, massively, when things got tight in 1982 and then later moved the Tax Reform Act of 1986. He invaded countries, but manageable, symbolic ones. My defense of Reagan is limited - he was not a president I would vote for - but on the narrow question of whether he was worse than Bush 43, I cannot see the case for it.
Here's one aspect in which Bush is monumentally worse than Reagan, Nixon, or Bush 41: Talk to any senior career official in the Justice Department, EPA, Interior, HHS, etc., and they will tell you that through however many administrations they served under, they basically did their jobs as the law required them to do. They might have had conflicts with the White House, they might have lost big policy fights, but on the day to day questions of what cases to investigate or how to enforce existing law, they were free to do their jobs. That is manifestly not the case any more, with implications for science, civil rights, election law, and many other fields.
I was born when JFK was President, and for Cubans, the reflex is to revile JFK - for the Bay of Pigs of course. Indeed, when I am in a particularly wicked mood, I like to recount to my father my conferences with Senator Kennedy and tell him what a great Senator Kennedy is. It's funny. Any way, my take on the Presidents of my ifetime on the flip.
JFK - was a lot more conservative than Dems like to admit. Average President in my opinion. Fact is as a public man, Teddy Kennedy is clearly the most outstanding Kennedy of all. We don't know what Bobby Kennedy would have become, but JFK? Sorry, but he was a pretty damn timid politician in my opinion. LBJ did things JFK would never have done.
LBJ - Vietnam has doomed him for history, but on domestic policy one of the greatest Presidents of the 20th Century. Just one fact - he cut poverty in half! But Vietnam . . .
Nixon - A paranoid lying crook with no respect for the law. But other that, how did you like the play Mrs. Lincoln? Pretty well in fact. Nixon was a pretty liberal President on domestic policy. Certainly, he was not an incompetent.
Carter - Blasphemy - Carter was a bad President. Bad instincts. Bad decisions. Bad leadership. But incompetent? Not at all.
Reagan - Obviously a despicable man and President. A real divider on race. In that sense, worse than Bush. But in every other, as Schmitt points out, much superior to Bush.
Bush 41 - I have already opined that I think Bush 41 was a good President and his performance in Desert Storm superior. Would that his son was half the man the father was.
Clinton - A very good President - on NAFTA too (want to fight about it?) After 8 years, what was the condition of the country? What was our standing in the world? I rest my case.
Bush 43 - Is there anything left to say that has not been said already? A reckless, incompetent, stubborn idiot who surrounded himself with more reckless, incompetent, stubborn idiots. Hands down, by a country mile, the worst President of my lifetime.