It depends what ‘worst’ means

Actually I agree. GWB is not the “worst” president the US has had. I think he is the worst president the US has had.

All you need to know about the credibility of VDH is that he seems to think that the falling price of oil is unrelated to the slowing of economic activity, and is, by itself, merely to be taken as a piece of good fortune…

You’re all wrong. Bush is the worst president who has “had” the US.

Descended from our only bachelor President? Possibly gay? Please do tell us more. :-)

@15: Then you could be a buckybelle, and form geodesic structures…

re pierce (and many others), the usefully disparaging term “doughface” is not used enough these days

Jeff Davis. Worst. President. Evah…

Mrs. Tilton @6: You’re all wrong. Bush is the worst president who has “had” the US.

I second this and move for unanimous approval.

roger, dangerous waters.Very dangerous waters. BTDTBTT. Careful.

Apparently, carrying a placard that reads, “Not in my name!” actually makes it so.

James Buchanan hung on to win a Nobel Prize in economics in 1986. He’s the brains behind the “welfare cadillac” theory of the welfare state.

When my Dad was in the hospital a couple of years ago, I sat at his bedside and kept him entertained with a debate on who was/is the worst POTUS ever: James Buchanan or GWB? The question never got resolved (’twas a tie, IIRC) but it sure kept my dad entertained.

Pierce was pretty bad, too. Apparently even his son thought it was a bad idea for him to become President. Pierce was apparently picked because he was a handsome nonentity who would not offend anyone…that sounds familiar…

See how far we’ve fallen from the lofty heights of Van Buren’s Presidency? Walker Bush couldn’t even speak English.

How does Lincoln come out by novakant’s standards? If he does poorly, we may need to reassess whether that’s a good measure.

I can’t quite match Belle, but my ancestors built commerce raiders for the Confederacy and my wife claims descent from (or maybe descent from a brother of) the captain of one of them, James Waddell, who fired the last shots of the Civil War. He was raiding the US Arctic whaling fleet and took some convincing that the war was over. So, I guess there’s a bit more CT interest in ranking GWB as the worst, and taking a little bit more of the spotlight off our ancestors.

Sometime shortly after 9-11, had Bush got out a sheet of paper, drawn a line down the middle, and labeled the left side “Facts (or what we actually know)” and the other side “rumors, wishes, conspiracy theories, partisanship, conservative ideology, and the like, etc,” and simply stuck to the left side of the paper, chances are, he’d be leaving a better legacy.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in failing to send an assassination squad to take out Hitler although he had lots of time to do so, is the worst president in history.

Since from 1939-45 there were some 15 assassination attempts on Hitler’s life, most of them very carefully planned and quite a few of them by people very close to him, I don’t see how US spies would have had a chance to be successful in such an endeavor. My challenge is a serious one and therefore one cannot presuppose omnipotence or prescience on the part of those scrutinized, but rather one has to take into account how the actual situation was constraining their choices.

I think Lincoln needs to be reassessed, because it’s not wholly unreasonable to argue that the civil war was at its heart a conflict between two different economic models (though for obvious reasons a different narrative is preferred by most) and even if one disagrees with that, one has to weigh the unpleasant but peaceful alternatives (secession, slavery) against the body count.

[Lincoln] was the president we had at the time . . . .

You go to war with the president you have, not the president you–

Wait a minute, what am I saying here?

The “Is Bush The. Worst. President. Ever?’ question seems silly but, at the same time, maybe one of the more successful examples I can think of Lakoff-style political ‘framing’ (more specifically, probably, ‘framing via anchoring‘).

I suspect, though, there’s probably no way to set that anchor permanently–it’s just too susceptible to future events. So, for example, here’s a non-far-fetched hypothetical. Imagine that Iraq continues to stabilize (not unlikely). And suppose Obama proceeds with his promised intensification of efforts in Afghanistan but that effort fails, so that Saigon-style rooftop helicopter evacuations never happen in Baghdad but they do happen in Kabul in 2010? What happens to the retrospective evaluation of Bush in that scenario? Or, on the other hand, what if Obama’s Afghanistan ‘surge’ works about as well as the strategy in Iraq and comes to be seen as a repetition and confirmation of a successful Bush effort?

In general, I don’t think there’s any way that the perception of Bush won’t ultimately be affected quite strongly by events that have not yet occurred. And it’s not just Iraq — the same is true on global warming and the economy.

the civil war was at its heart a conflict between two different economic models (though for obvious reasons a different narrative is preferred by most) and even if one disagrees with that, one has to weigh the unpleasant but peaceful alternatives (secession, slavery) against the body count.

Mr. Lincoln responds:

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it. Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered. That of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses; for it must needs be that offenses come, but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

Magistra, let me play devil’s advocate for a moment. There was a conflict between two economic systems, slavery versus wage slavery.

In theory slavery was supposed to provide a degree of security to slaves. When they got too old to be productive the owner was still supposed to provide for them. In practice this was not enforced — unproductive slaves could be sold for whatever they’d get, and owners who did that suffered only a social stigma. Meanwhile, wage slaves had no security at all but could be sacked to fend for themselves at the first sign of an economic slowdown. If they didn’t make it through the depression into the next recovery, no problem. There were plenty more wage slaves where those came from.

As it turned out, we had a war. Three million men lost productive years from their lives, suffering the privations of wartime military food etc. Around 600,000 died, 400,000 wounded. The result was the southern race relations that led to the civil rights movement.

Meanwhile, over the next hundred years, wage slavery got regulated. We got a 40-hour week, with overtime. No child labor. Pension plans. Worker safety regulation. Unemployement compensation. Even unions. The worst abuses of the system were ameliorated.

Imagine that we had not abolished slavery but had tried that approach to that system too. We currently have severe penalties for people who mistreat their pets. We could have gotten that early for slaves. And enforce minimal standards for care of old or disabled slaves. Minimal standards for care of all slaves, like those for farm animals etc only improved.

As the south got more sophisticated financial instruments they might likely have found that slavery was unprofitable compared to wage slavery. Southern financial institutions were simply not capable of handling a wage economy. Slavery let slaves be purchased when the money was there — immediately after the crop was sold. Sharecropping was a later innovation to fill the same lack. A new york sweatshop owner who couldn’t make payroll could go to his factor and get an advance. A southern plantation owner could not.

What’s the chance it would turn out cheaper to own slaves than to rent them, the yankee way? Given an adequate credit market, slavery would likely turn into an affectation. No war required, no million casualties necessary. It would take some time, though.

I don’t think that outcome was actually possible though, even if it worked. Slaveowners were too upset about the possibility that slavery would be made flat-out illegal. That was a threat when a majority of the senate came from free states, so they needed half the new states to be slave states. And abolitionists were dead-set against that, not least for the same reason, they couldnt abolish slavery when there were too many slave states. It was people fighting over ideology and their respective ways of life, and neither side would tolerate slow change. Both were hot to fight and die, and it would have been very hard to delay them too long in that.

@47 “The life of a slave was a terrible and undignified life, but obviously it was still better than being killed.”

To me there is nothing obvious about this. Perhaps what you meant is that it is obvious to someone who knows nothing at all of what it is like to live as a slave.

Another consideration:
Would our hypothetical Confederacy abolished slavery as it became less profitable? Or would it evolved into something still oppressive, just not in the cotton fields. Unpaid factory workers tied to the factory, mine workers bound to the mine, servants bound to service. Types of “unfree” labor have survived in many places into the 21th century.

We start with the hindsight: the war was horribly costly, couldn’t there been a better, less bloody way? Sure. And there could have been a worse way too.

Matt Mckeon, I think your speculations are entirely reasonable. There’s certainly no guarantee that slavery would have been abolished or ameliorated without the war. We have no control group for our experiment, all we know is what happened.

By 1860 it was probably too late for any other outcome. The extremists on both sides were too strong. To do things different would have required a difference earlier.

There’s a question whether it was worthwhile to preserve a Union that large parts of the nation did not want. Like the story about the eight boy scouts who helped an old woman cross the street. It took eight of them because she didn’t want to go….

It’s plausible to me that a surviving confederacy would not abolish slavery any time soon. If it became unprofitable then it wouldn’t be a big issue, it would turn into an unusual custom. Here’s the rationale — with importation of slaves already banned, to raise a new slave to service age requires a considerable investment by an owner. At least a few years getting in the way of a female slave’s work, years of feeding, somebody has to spend time to teach it what to do, etc. But wage-slaves scrape by without anybody in particular responsible for them. A slave must be fed and cared for even when there’s no work. A wage-slave can be laid off; if work picks up he can be brought back and if he isn’t available somebody else will work for the same wages or less. Old slaves are supposed to be cared for. Old wage-slaves can be let loose to fend for themselves, it’s their lookout to save enough. Slaves *have to* be bred, new wage-slaves come by the eager boatload from europe. How could slavery possibly be profitable? If foreigners sent us hundreds of millions of Hondas and BMWs and Priuses to lease cheap, who would buy a car?

Slaves might be used for special jobs, like nuclear workers, things that free men wouldn’t do for any amount of money. But do you trust slaves with those jobs? Slaves have a long reputation for bungling anything they might not get blamed for. Li Ssu, the Chin bureaucrat and philosopher, had an administrative goal, “So fool-proof a slave can do it”. No, not nuclear workers.

While the southern economy required slaves, they couldn’t get rid of it. But when it became useless, there were a lot of europeans calling nations savages for not abolishing slavery, and some small attempts at boycot etc. When they didn’t need it, why not give in?

I can imagine slavery might have ended reasonably quickly without the war. It’s plausible. As you point out, it isn’t so plausible that apartheid would end so easily.

Plausible. Not guaranteed. But then, a lot of americans were itching for a war. I don’t know how else we could have satisfied that itch.

Johnny, you’ve hit the central point.

We’re still arguing about Lincoln. Many people consider Lincoln one of the greatest presidents because on his watch we had a 5-year civil war with a million US casualties, interest rates went to 10% for the first time in the nation’s history, and he delivered some great speeches.

Since it’s entirely a matter of opinion which actions are blunders, people will disagree. There are people even today who claim to believe iraq was building nukes and we had to stop them. There are people to this day who believe Social Security was in such terrible danger that we should have given Bush the SS money so he could bail SS out of trouble by betting it on the stock market. (Not so many of those.)

If they could have delayed the bank meltdown and stock market crash until after Obama took over a lot more people would think it was all Obama’s fault. But Bush was able to extract a lot more money the way it worked out, and my guess is he’d rather have the money than the reputation.

JThomas,
“Was it worthwhile to preserve a Union” when a lot of people wanted to leave it.

That point is undermined by the fact that they wanted to leave the US to establish a society based on forcing people to be slaves. Indeed the Confederacy longed to expand the slave system, and some planned wars of conquest to plant it in Central America. A Confederacy would have meant certain oppression for millions in perpetuality, foreign wars, and possibly future wars between the fragmented states in North America. Guerilla warfare from African Americans unwilling to wait forever and without other options?

Slavery is “abolished” in our hypothetical Confederacy. Replaced by what? Most likely a modern version
of Jim Crow that would extend throughout the 21st century.

“Was it worthwhile to preserve a Union” when a lot of people wanted to leave it.

That point is undermined by the fact that they wanted to leave the US to establish a society based on forcing people to be slaves.

Exactly! A whole lot of people were ready to kill to stop slavery, so the war was pretty much inevitable. They wanted to defeat the rebels, crush them, and then force the survivors to behave like proper US citizens.

And everything came up roses, very low costs and wonderful results, so who should grumble?

A Confederacy would have meant certain oppression for millions in perpetuality, foreign wars, and possibly future wars between the fragmented states in North America.

I discount the last of those, since fighting a giant war to prevent the possible outbreak of war in the future…. Your first two points are important. Certain opprression for millions in perpetutity. Foreign wars. Yes. If the confederacy had lasted those might have been even worse than they turned out in reality.

Slavery is “abolished” in our hypothetical Confederacy. Replaced by what? Most likely a modern version of Jim Crow that would extend throughout the 21st century.

Agreed. Probably worse than the reality. South africa ended apartheid, and the confederacy might have too, but they might have given each other support and lasted longer.

On the plus side, the USA wouldn’t have had all those southern voters that have caused us so much trouble. Texans would likely get into enough disastrous wars to beat a lot of the tar out of them. That would be painful for them and for their opponents, but consider the existing alternative. If it was worth the civil war to get Jim Crow instead of slavery, how many wars would be justified to avoid today’s Texas?

It’s hard to be sure what things would be like if they were different. I think it’s plausible that things might be better if the north had managed to avoid the civil war. But I’m not at all sure what it would have taken to do that. Too many people ready to fight.

In another 20 years could we get that for abortion? We could get lots of people ready to kill to prevent abortion, but I can’t imagine there are many willing to die to keep the right. But instead, these days when we get a lot of people who’re ready for a war we always manage to provide a foreign war for them.

I predict that long before 2050 the idea that the Bush administration was a catastrophe without historical precedent will look ridiculous.

Well, I can easily imagine that within 42 years we might get somebody worse.

Hard to come up with a candidate for a previous president who’s as bad, though.

But maybe in the future our standards might change. Like, once we permanently give up the idea that we have civil rights we might not mind that Bush got rid of them. When we forget they were ever important we won’t mind that they’re gone.

Imagine that we had not abolished slavery but had tried that approach to that system too. We currently have severe penalties for people who mistreat their pets. We could have gotten that early for slaves. And enforce minimal standards for care of old or disabled slaves. Minimal standards for care of all slaves, like those for farm animals etc only improved.

What do you mean “we,” paleface? What “we” would have required and implemented an SPCA for slaves? The South absolutely rejected any federal authority to regulate slavery in the states. Until the passage of the post-Civil War amendments, Lincoln himself thought he could act against slavery only by the exercise of the war power. The slave states themselves showed no interest in exercising their undoubted power over domestic slavery to ameliorate the condition of slaves. Indeed, the trend had for decades been toward harsher, not more humane treatment.

The slave states themselves showed no interest in exercising their undoubted power over domestic slavery to ameliorate the condition of slaves.

Sure, and the USA has seldom shown interest in regulating the stock markets, instead letting them make a show of pretending to self-regulate. It’s hard to get governments to exercise power over entrenched economic interests. There’s hardly a nation in the world where banking is illegal, for example. Even china — founded on the idea of protecting people from capitalists — now allows private banks.

I claim that if the south got an adequate financial system — even with the burden of legal banking — then they would find that large-scale slavery was not cost-effective. And without the profits driving it, the rest would have a chance to unravel.

Not a sure thing. Not something that could possibly satisfy abolitionists, who were out for blood. And of course it made a difference that they thought it would be a quick and easy war. March in, kill a few people, arrest the leaders, free the slaves, go home satisfied with a job well done and at that point it’s over, everything’s fine.

Where is the culture that routinely accepts that employees can be raped, beaten, branded or have their children taken away at their employer’s will?

Have a look into the circumstances of cocoa production in the Cote d’Ivoire for instance.

In the really bad President gallery, Jackson (the Trail of Tears) and Wilson (almost everything) need to be considered.

Slocum, Bush did illegal spying, and when he got caught on it he got the laws changed to make it OK. To my mind that’s worse than doing illegal things that people would disapprove of, secretly enough that it doesn’t become an issue.

What?!!? You don’t care about either the extent of the spying or the targets and (potential terrorists vs political opponents) — you only care about whether or not it was successfully kept under wraps (because if people don’t know about it, it’s not so bad)? That just strikes me as a truly bizarre attempt to start with the conclusion (that Bush was the worst ever) and then work backwards to try to find justification (which just isn’t there).

Bush made the case that we don’t deserve civil liberties while we have a permanent war against a nonstate, and a big part of the public went along with him.

No civil liberties? Of any kind? By historical standards, the civil liberties restrictions after 9/11 were pretty mild and are very likely to prove short-lived (unless you all have badly misjudged Obama). No, that doesn’t make them OK–but let’s have a little perspective.

And then, IMHO, the worst civil liberties problems we’re facing now have nothing to do with Bush and the war on terror and won’t be fixed by Obama — the war on drugs along with the no-knock, middle of the night paramilitary SWAT raids, for example, or the sex-offender list insanities. I’m no fan of warrantless wiretaps, but it doesn’t suck 1/10th as much as this kind of crap:

“Woman May Lose Her Home Because of Decade-Old Blowjob”

And it ain’t just the bible belt:

“Connecticut Teacher Facing Jail for Porno Popups”

The biggest problem I have with lefties on civil liberties is that if a particular issue can be blamed on Bush, they blow it completely out of proportion (The worst ever! A fascist coup is coming!), and if it can’t be blamed on Bush, they have a hard time even seeing it as a problem.

“The biggest problem I have with lefties on civil liberties is that if a particular issue can be blamed on Bush, they blow it completely out of proportion (The worst ever! A fascist coup is coming!), and if it can’t be blamed on Bush, they have a hard time even seeing it as a problem.”

That was Lindsay Beyerstein at HuffPo you linked about the pop-ups, right? Did either Beyerstein or HuffPo cease to be “lefty” while I wasn’t looking? I don’t think my fellow liberals left me the only one to take up for Genarlow Wilson and to argue against the ridiculousness of Georgia’s laws and prosecutions.

That was Lindsay Beyerstein at HuffPo you linked about the pop-ups, right? Did either Beyerstein or HuffPo cease to be “lefty” while I wasn’t looking?

No, but my reading of lefty sites is that while they do take note of these kinds issues from time to time, the passion is just a fraction of what it is for any Bush-related issue. And also that, for paternalistic reasons, lefties are generally more tolerant the state restricting liberties with the goal of protecting people from themselves (drugs, porn, booze, tobacco, fast food…) My sense of the last time drug legalization was discussed on CT was first that it was some time ago (which is never the case for Bush-related, possible-end-of-civilization-as-we-know-it items), and second that there was quite a lot of ambivalence about ending the war on drugs (because of a need to protect people from themselves). But that’s just my sense of the lefty zeitgeist–YMMV.

Also, with regard to the short-livedness of the post-9/11 civil liberties restrictions, why did they seem likely, ex ante Obama’s election, to be short-lived? Had they been conditioned on some status that is soon to end?

Yes — status soon to end was Republican control of the White House. A single-party’s hold on the U.S. presidency is, historically speaking, always soon to end. Two to three terms is about it. By that time, the party in power has worn out its welcome and Americans are ready for a change. So from this point, you can now figure on 4-12 years of Democratic control.

You don’t care about either the extent of the spying or the targets and (potential terrorists vs political opponents)—you only care about whether or not it was successfully kept under wraps (because if people don’t know about it, it’s not so bad)?

If a murderer gets away with murder, that’s bad. If a murderer very publicly gets away with it, if he further gets a lot of people thinking that sometimes murder is appropriate — say if you kill your adulterous wife and her paramour — that’s worse.

No civil liberties? Of any kind?

Well, I never got it completely clear how far the new laws went. Like, you don’t find out until specific cases get argued out in court, right?

So if it isn’t clear whether they can lock up a US citizen for an indefinite time with no access to anybody about anything, no trial, no publicity, etc, then it won’t get clear until we have a US citizen who manages to go to court over whether they can do it or not.

To my way of thinking, if you can’t keep them from locking you up indefinitely without charges, you don’t have any other civil rights either. And there’s no way to really tell whether they can legally do that unless they try and it goes to court, which it can be argued it would not. And there’s no way to tell whether they are actually doing it unless somebody gets out and tells the tale.

Again, I’m not defending the treatment of Hamdi and Padilla, but we’re talking about two men. And their cases were widely publicized even before they got their days in court. Or do you think there are hundreds or thousands of unknown U.S. citizens who have become Desaparecidos as in the Argentine dirty war?

I simply don’t know. There could be. The ones who get the publicity might not be at all representative of the ones who don’t.

How can anyone concerned about liberties worry more about Jose Padilla than the millions who pass through U.S. prisons on drug charges?

The drug war is bad and bipartisan. It appears to be waged by the bad rules that were publicly set out for it. It might be intensely corrupt, so that people get framed for drug offenses they didn’t do, and some drug cartels bribe police to destroy their competitors — maybe the police serve to protect monopolies rather than actually reduce sales beyond what monopoly prices would do. But the rules are public. You could for example get a list of the people imprisoned on drug charges, apart from the minors. Police who intentionally frame victims for crimes they don’t do are committing a crime, and they know it. They might do it anyway secure in the belief they’ll never be discovered, but there’s no question it’s criminal behavior on their part.

The federal government has argued that it is not responsible to anybody about what it does to people accused of terrorism. Not to courts, not to congress, not to voters, not to big business, not to anybody. Have they acted according to their beliefs? How would you find out? They think it’s none of your business. They say they’d be doing all right and proper to lie to you about it.