Worst President in US history?

Why, they had an opportunity and they used it to advance interests of their constituency, oil and arms interests; nothing’s wrong or unusual with that. And what’s with this silly ‘unite’ business, unite to do what? The quote is ridiculous.

I know that during his administration, or soon after, it wasn’t uncommon for people of a variety of political perspectives to call Johnson the worst president ever, but were the other two given this label during their administrations by anyone other than those from the other side of the aisle, especially their political rivals or those loyal to them, during or immediately after their administrations? I ask because it seems quite strange to judge a president historically before the effects of his presidency have had time to play themselves out historically. More than strange, it seems downright irresponsible coming from a history professor, who should know that these things take time to play themselves out, and that making more than superficial historical judgments of complex series of events and actions in the moment, instead of when the passage of time has created an intellectual and practical distance from those events and actions.

Look at Wilentz’ three examples. Buchanan’s incompetency, on top of the incompetency of his immediate predecessors, led one of, if not the darkest period in U.S. history (though one could argue that by 1857, it was inevitable, and Buchanan merely hastened its arrival); Johnson’s led to a God-awful mess in the south, which ultimately had lasting effects (felt even today, perhaps); and Hoover backed right into the Depression, which has also had lasting effects. In all three cases, it’s not their immediate actions that allow them to be used as examples, but what resulted from them after (sometimes long after) they were out of office that makes it possible to judge them as really bad presidents. Sure, Bush has made terrible decision after terrible decision, and it’s hard to imagine the war in Iraq not having really bad long-term consequences, but we don’t yet know what those consequences will be, and it may be that the short-term effects of most of his actions (with the exception of Iraq) will turn out to be easily reversed or overcome. Hell, maybe the lack of unity, which, as the 2000 election showed, existed before Bush got there, will turn out to be a good thing. Maybe the two parties will actually be different on issues other than abortion, tax cuts, and the environment (and war, at least when it’s politically expedient for Democrats to oppose it). Or maybe the Bush years will make people so sick of constant political conflict that they’ll come together. And hey, while it’s unlikely, Bush still has 2 whole years to confront his own failures. Maybe Dick Cheney will accidentally shoot him in the frontal lobe, radically altering his personality, and allowing him to admit mistakes and address them. The point is, we don’t know what will happen, or what the effects of Bush’s presidency will be after he’s out of office, and until we do, judging Bush historically this way seems pretty damn stupid.

Two thoughts. 1) Rolling Stone ?!? (I mean, it’s not the obvious choice for an academic.)

2) Chris on comment 3. What is the point of studying or teaching history if not, at least once in a while, to draw comparisons with the present? We don’t know what the long-term consequences will be; but it’s worth while making the best educated guesses we can.

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“For the life of me, I can’t think of anything Bush might have done after 9-11 which would have united the left and the right.”

Invading Afghanistan and going after bin Laden seemed to do the trick nicely. Using the creation of the Department of Homeland Security as an excuse to try and bust public sector unions, not so much.

“And where are the Democrats?”
Posted by Brendan

Brendan, how does this make a difference in Bush being scum?

Chris, we’ve heard that before, the angry complaint that there hasn’t been enough time yet, that perhaps all the king’s horses and all the king’s men might actually be able to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. We hear the statements made earlier spun away; we hear the people who predicted that the present troubles would never happen later state that they were unavoidable.

Brett: “For the life of me, I can’t think of anything Bush might have done after 9-11 which would have united the left and the right. ”

Brett, I’ll take that as a confession. For the non-Bush worshipping overwhelming majority of Americans, going after OBL and Al Qaida until they were dead would have been a uniting concern. Solid, competant security improvements would have been a uniting concern – not Potemkin non-security used as a GOP partisan issue. Leaning on Saudi Arabia to stop funding jihadists would have been a uniting concern.

This seems a little overwrought. As I recall, there was quite a bit of acrimony during the Clinton administration, although in that case the academic consensus of course was that it was the fault of the Republican opposition, not the President. In fact, it seems always to be the academic consensus that whatever is wrong, it is the fault of the Republicans. Unfortunately, the majority of our fellow citizens don’t seem to agree, which of course explains why academics get so overwrought.

And by the way, what’s this about leaning on Saudi Arabia? I thought the solution was to lean on Israel! Boy, am I confused.

‘“And where are the Democrats?”
Posted by Brendan

Brendan, how does this make a difference in Bush being scum?’

It doesn’t make any difference. My point is that Bush is the most unpopular president in living memory. He is surrounded by crooks, many of whom are in jail, many more of whom will shortly be in jail. His foreign policy has turned out to be a total catastrophe. His domestic policy agenda is in ruins.

The Democrats should be on 50, 60, 70 percent approval levels. They should be looking forward to taking back Congress, the Senate and cruising to an easy victory in the next Presidential elections.

And yet none of these things are happening. And I think it’s reasonable to ask: why not?

The Democrats should be on 50, 60, 70 percent approval levels.

[snip]
And yet none of these things are happening. And I think it’s reasonable to ask: why not?

In fact, that is exact what’s happening.

Last Tuesday’s WaPo-ABC News poll found 55 percent ready to vote democratic in the mid-terms. Dems are trusted more on the economy, 49 to 43. Leads are even higher immigration (12 points), prescription drug benefits for the elderly (28 points), health care (32 points) and dealing with corruption in Washington (25 points). Terrorism, Re publican’s bread and butter for the last 6 years, is a tie at 46/45.

Sorry, Brendan, I didn’t understand your statement (which was sorta cryptic).

Probable reasons, which have a cumulative effect:

1) Massive media bias (read Daily Howler, Media Wh*res Online and Krugman’s early NYT columns for documentation). The MSM, after spending 8 years printing whatever lies the GOP’s propaganda mills could come up with, gave Bush almost a 100% pass on his lies, and his background as a corrupt failure.

2) ‘Republican Government in Exile’. This was a term coined during the Clinton administration by a poster to Salon’s Table Talk. She coined it after seeing the same set of ‘former [Reagan-Bush I] administration officials’, who seemed to have full-time jobs with ‘think tanks’ in DC. They were still in politics, full-time, just in the private sector. This, IMHO was very useful for the GOP because it allowed a lot of people to continue political activities, despite losing the government. When the GOP took over the House and Senate in ’94, this removed a lot of Democratic workers from politics.

3) The wealthy elites. The GOP has been the national party of the wealthy elite for over the past 100 years. That’s a massive starting advantage. It feeds back into the media bias; no matter what the reporters are, the publishers are conservative.

4) Right-wing religious populism. This causes tens of millions of Americans to vote against their eonomic interests, shoring up a crucial weakness of the economic elites (that they’re a minority). And it helps with the media, because they’re hesitant to openly criticize peoples’ religious beliefs.

5) The shock of 1994 and the Clinton administration. I’ve heard it predicted that the Democratic Party won’t re-emerge as a strong party until it’s controlled by people who weren’t in the leadership/middle managment in 1994. Those people don’t really understand that they’ve lost an institutional base of power, and that the GOP not only won’t return it, but that they’ll leverage it to the hilt.

6) 9/11 and war. The Bush administration’s popularity was not very good on Sep 10, 2001, and it had nowhere to go but down. Bush had passed his tax cuts; most of us got $300, while the deficit was already skyrocketing. The only thing that Bush had in store was the appointment of right-wing judges, which would have been a galvanizing thing for the Democratic party membership. Then came 9/11, the worst attack suffered on US soil since Pearl Harbor. That was gift for Bush, one that he’s exploited since then, with the Iraq war. Prof. Polkatz’s has some very nice charts showing the effects of 9/11 and the Iraq War on Bush’s popularity (http://www.pollkatz.homestead.com/files/pollkatzmainGRAPHICS_8911_image001.gif and http://www.pollkatz.homestead.com/files/BNCapp_12756_image001.gif).

The American political system has a whole series of institutional barriers to protect the government from the people. The constitution ensures that the Senate will be profoundly undemocratic–Alaska, Wyoming, and Idaho are our rotten boroughs–and the House is little better now that districts have been drawn to ensure that very few seats are at risk in any election. Meanwhile, the press–at least the part of the press that matters–has become distinctly less free because of corporate consolidation and the erosion of journalistic standards. If Bush is currently in trouble, it’s not because the people have turned on him but because the elites that are really in charge have decided he’s a liability. Indeed, the people would have turned on this bum a long time ago in a country with a free press (= a country where a relatively homogenous set of interests has a monopoly on the means of propaganda).

I don’t expect that generally popular government will return to the U.S. in the forseeable future–I don’t even know if that would be a good thing. One would wish, however, that the ruling oligarchy would do a better job of vetting its candidates for elected king.

What I want the press to print is not what I want it to print, but the full range of political facts and options. Anyhow, to speak about “the press simply printing what IT wants to print” is a mystification because the IT is actually a THEY, and the they is a pretty small bunch.

If what was at question were merely the availability of information, you’d have to give the U.S. media a lot of credit because if you’re looking for alternate views and facts, you can find ’em. Which is why, though I don’t think we have a free press, I’m not claiming we have a completely unfree press eitehr. From a political point of view, however, what matters is the press considered as an instrument of mass propaganda and in that sense our institutions are decidedly undemocratic.

What’s this with Osama bin Laden? Who cares?

I’m convinced that if Gore had been sworn in rather than Bush, the 9/11 attacks never would have even happened. Not that I’m a conspiracy theorist who thinks Bush directly orchestrated them, it just seems in retrospect to have been a fairly easy plot to foil. Does anyone remember how much energy was spent on the sheer idiocy of “Star Wars”-type plans in the early days, and even after 9/11? So basically, I see Bush as having gotten a hugely artificial popularity boost from an attack that occurred due to his incompetence, after having stolen the election.

In short, I hate the man and nothing he could do aside from becoming a totally different person would placate me.

I suppose Bush could be the worst president in history (I doubt it-just leftists whining), but the argumentthat he is because Left doesn’t like him (he’s a divider, not a uniter), isn’t even relevant to the argument. Bush is the worst president in history because his political opponents don’t like him? Come on.

I think about .01% of Wilentz’s points are related to Bush’s failure to get his political opponents to like him. That was the first thing someone harped upon in this comment thread, and now you’re assuming for some reason that it’s also the focus of the article.

This is the problem with having a blog comment thread about a long article that isn’t included entirely in the post that we’re commenting on.

backward dave: Think not, “Rolling Stone”, but “Sean Wilnetz”
(Sorry all, a bit late on this one..)

That was the first thing someone harped upon in this comment thread, and now you’re assuming for some reason that it’s also the focus of the article.

Sorry, I should have said “That was the first part of the article quoted in the post, and now you’re assuming that it’s also the focus of the article.”

I would say the reason Bush is in trouble is that nothing he could plausibly do could gain the support of the left,…

The fact that you included the word “plausibly” in there is pretty funny.

There are plenty of things he could do to gain at least the grudging support of the left (convene a commission on what to do about Iraq that includes at least one non-neoconservative, for example), but none of those things are plausible at this point.

In other words, although it is possible for Bush to do something that I would support, I can’t imagine it happening. My distrust for him trumps any possible merits of what he says or claims to be doing.

Seriously, doesn’t the charge of “worst president ever” just sound like a really melodramatic way of saying, “I don’t like the guy?”

That’s the gist of it Barry.

Bush challenges Buchanan who stood by as the South seceded (Bush does the same with Iran, N.Korea, Bin Laden), Nixon for unnecessary body count, and Hoover for economic futility. He’s an allround player. MVP of the stooges.

“I think about .01% of Wilentz’s points are related to Bush’s failure to get his political opponents to like him. That was the first thing someone harped upon in this comment thread, and now you’re assuming for some reason that it’s also the focus of the article.

This is the problem with having a blog comment thread about a long article that isn’t included entirely in the post that we’re commenting on.”

Cryptic Ned-
I actually agree with you. I skimmed the article this weekend. But if that 1% is so unimportant, and the other 99% is so important, why in the world would Chris have quoted this particular paragraph? My criticism was of Chris-not the magazine article as a whole.

Steve

It’s the money.

Both Republocrats and Demicans are owned and operated by their big money donors, be they rapacious corporations, military contractors, unions, trial lawyers, fundamentalist mega-churches and TV preachers, whatever.

The only way out of this is full public campaign financing. We’re making some headway with AB583 here in California; if you live in the state visit http://www.caclean.org and urge your state senator to support AB 583.

America is much less powerful under and after Bush than before. Or more accurately, the extent of our power is much more clearly defined.

When nobody really knew just how much we could do before we had to pull back, we had a position of strength. Right now we couldn’t disarm a Boy Scout Jamboree, and the whole world knows it. I doubt that even Iran fears a ground invasion at this point. The troops to do it simply don’t exist, and bombs, even nukes don’t guarantee destroying a weapons program.

Barry wrote:

Well, Bush does have a way to go to beat Buchanan and Nixon, in terms of US body count

Barry, I like your way of thinking. Here in Australia we have an expression, “Look at the scoreboard!” and as a way of measuring badness numbers of kills is hard to top.

However, being unAmerican a foreigner I’m more inclined to look at the human body count, rather than just US dead. Looking at the death tolls of each president and their armed forces ISTM that Harry S Truman is the worst, followed by Richard M Nixon, Lyndon B Johnson and Franklin D Roosevelt.

[To be pre-emptive I have no time for those who would seek to justify the presidential slaughters on the grounds that the other side started it or was bad. You might not start a war but you certainly get to choose how you fight it. Woodrow Wilson fought a world war with very few American-inflicted civilian casualties.]

Syd, very good point. It still puts Bush below Nixon and Buchanan. What worries me is that Bush has three years left, no morals ever, and many good reasons to ‘double down’.

The worst president in American history is Woodrow Wilson. No Wilsonian interventionism = no Treaty of Versailles = no Hitler. Kind of hard to top that. Through his supreme arrogance and meddling, Wilson made WWII inevitable. Oh, and he was also a racist scumbag who purged blacks from the civil service. And he locked people up in jail for opposing his vainglorious little war. But he was a college professor, so the intellectuals all love him, and we still see people actually taking “Wilsonian” ideals seriously.

The shrub is a distant number two. Buchanan and Pierce were pretty bad, but the Civil War was really inevitable since the South wasn’t willing to accept anything but total capitulation to the Slave Power. Yes, they could have done much more. Hoover was guilty mostly of failing to think outside the box. Keynesian remedies simply weren’t in the mental universe of government leaders at the time. It took a true innovator (FDR) to put them there. But that proves that FDR was unusually good, not that Hoover was unusually bad.

Grant and Harding shouldn’t even be in the ten worst. Their petty corruption (nothing compared to the shrub’s) did no lasting damage, and they had legitimate offsetting accomplishments (Harding pardoned Eugene Debs and sponsored anti-lynching legislation; Grant fought hard against KKK terrorism).

Syd Webb is utterly misguided in his position because you cannot separate war casualties from the question of blame. We’re responsible for Iraq II casualties because we started the war with no good reason. WWII, on the other hand, started when the Japanese attacked us and Hitler then followed up by declaring war, and it was already a total war when Truman whipped out the A-bomb. No U.S. president would, could, or should have done anything differently. Furthermore, the bomb saved lives because the alternative would have been a bloody ground invasion that would have killed millions rather than mere hundreds of thousands. And the Soviets might have gotten a big chunk of Japan, and who knows what future horrors Stalin might have done there. Given that Japan is today a peaceful, prosperous democracy in large part due to our reconstruction, I’m willing to give FDR and Truman the benefit of the doubt. Somehow I’m less optimistic about Iraq turning out that way.

Firebug wrote:

The worst president in American history is Woodrow Wilson. No Wilsonian interventionism = no Treaty of Versailles = no Hitler. Kind of hard to top that.

You can’t blame a US president for the actions of Hitler. Responsibility there rests with Hitler.

If you must blame a US President FDR is more proximate. He was the leader of the most powerful nation in the world but did nothing at Munich.

Compared with Neville Chamberlain FDR comes off second best. Chamberlain was able to lead his country to war with Germany in September 1939. FDR was unable to get his country to declare war on Germany until two-and-a-quarter years later after – get this – Hitler had already declared war on Germany. Weak as water!

Syd Webb is utterly misguided in his position because you cannot separate war casualties from the question of blame.

You can and I did. Wilson fought a world war and his troops inflected 100,000 casualties. Truman fought a police action – Korea – and killed four million. Completely disproportionate.

Now you can argue that the holocaust in Korea was justified in anti-communist terms. Yet when Hitler fought communism – he called it Judeo-Bolshevism – there were 25 million Soviet citizens killed, 3 million of them Jewish, as well as 3 million Jews of other nationalities.

No, when talking about mega-deaths I have little time with ends-justifies-the means arguments. I don’t believe that good intentions take you off your Hell-bound path.

Besides, I offer a simple metric for Presidential badness: How many people did their servants kill? Just a question of looking at the scoreboard. No quibbles about was the goal well-kicked or forced; whether the touchdown was brilliantly executed or fumbled.

It’s an impartial metric whereas Firebug’s approach is whimsical, effectively – “I like Nixon, I don’t like Wilson.”

My metric may not be to everyone’s taste – if you don’t think presidents should hold hands with their wives in public then Jimmy Carter is the Worst. President. Ever.

But my metric is objective – Firebug’s approach is purely subjective.

Hi Syd, Thanks for putting me straight, I’m a Brit but missed the Guardian article and was unaware of the FBI file release in 2000. Mind you I was somewhat preoccupied in defending a million dollar law suit in AZ at the time. Got a result too.

What’s this Bushian “rigid ideology,” anyway? Has Bush shown a consistent (let alone rigid!) position on any domestic issue besides his guest worker program?