Historians: Bush presidency "a failure...below average" (w/poll)
Mon May 01, 2006 at 07:26:46 PM PDT
A poll of 774 history professors commissioned by the
Siena College Research Institute spells bad news for Bush's legacy:
82 percent rated his presidency as either as "below average" (24%) or a "failure" (58%). We already knew that, of course, but it's nice to know the pros agree. To give you an idea of how lopsided the voting was:
Two percent judged Bush's performance as "great," 5 percent as "near great" and 11 percent as "average."
That adds up to 18%, which, perhaps not coincidentally, is Dick Cheney's approval rating.
If this story seems familiar, it's because this is only the latest step in the Bush presidency's slow, inevitable road towards the ash heap of history. More after the flip.
Far be it from me to deny you the pleasure of seeing this in a graphic right away:
This poll comes in the heels of a must-read Rolling Stone article in which respected historian Sean Wilenz argues that Bush is the worse president in American history:
How does any president's reputation sink so low? The reasons are best understood as the reverse of those that produce presidential greatness. In almost every survey of historians dating back to the 1940s, three presidents have emerged as supreme successes: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These were the men who guided the nation through what historians consider its greatest crises: the founding era after the ratification of the Constitution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second World War. Presented with arduous, at times seemingly impossible circumstances, they rallied the nation, governed brilliantly and left the republic more secure than when they entered office.
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.
By the way, that sound you hear in the distance as you read this is the carping of right-wingers accusing historians of the worst of crimes: liberal bias. To which I say: bullshit. This isn't political--it's performance-based:
"In our 2002 presidential rating, with a group of experts comparable to this current poll, President Bush ranked in the top half of all presidents," said Dr. Douglas Lonnstrom, director of the Siena Research Institute. "That was shortly after 9/11. Clearly, the professors do not think things have gone well for him in the past few years."
I don't care how liberal they are, historians have an academic reputation to protect. To compare a modern president to such failures as Buchanan, A. Johnson and Hoover is serious business in the academic community--yet more than half did exactly that when rating Bush in this poll. He's just that bad.
Today I finished reading an article in The American Prospect by Michael Tomasky (another must-read) on the idea of the common good. This paragraph describes eloquently the reason why Bush will be judged by history to have been such a disaster:
By 2008, we will have lived through seven-plus years of an administration that has done almost nothing for the common good, that has unleashed the most rapacious social Darwinism we've seen in this country for at least 80 years, and that has catered to its interest groups far more, at once more obsequiously and more arrogantly, than even the Mondale-era Democrats did. Americans are, and will be, ready for something very different.
So it's come to this: So throroughly has Bush destroyed the common good in America--in a scant 6 years!--that historians feel free to declare his presidency a failure more than 2 years before he leaves office. So complete is Bush's failure that historians compare him to Buchanan, who let the country slip into civil war; Andrew Johnson, who bungled Reconstruction and was impeached) and Hoover, who looked on pitifully as the Great Depression consumed America. He's just that fucking bad.
Then again, perhaps this was his plan all alone. It's widely known that Dubya has longed been consumed with a burning desire to surpass his father; to go "mano-a-mano" with him in the history books and kick his ass. Perhaps Bush, having realized long ago he doesn't have the intellect or skill to do better than his father, he'd harness his incompetence and become a worse president than his father ever was; so terrible a president would he be, that nobody would ever remember Bush I--a competent, if not outstanding, president--because his son was such an unbelievable fuckup. This is the only way Bush II would ever surpass his father--by racing him to the bottom, and winning.
And by the looks of it, he's making record time.
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