There has been a lot of talk in the last couple months about “The Bush Legacy.” This is in no small part because Karen Hughes, Karl Rove, et al. actually organized a “Bush Legacy Project” to convince us (poor, mindless cretins that we be) “he really wasn’t as bad as you think.” I expect this effort will only escalate as we head into “the final days” and the fact that I use that phrase, so fraught with meaning from the Nixon years, says a lot about the fruit this effort will bear. But there’s a much clearer way to put it, “only a president with a truly lousy legacy would need a concerted effort to improve how his legacy is viewed.”
Is W the worst president ever? While plenty of people happily hang that title on him, the scientist in me thinks “worst” is a superlative, and thus sets a pretty high standard, and the historian in me says “Worse than Pierce? Worse than Buchanan? Worse than Harding?” Seems like we could have a healthy debate on the subject. But worst president to be re-elected? To wreak havoc for more than four years? Bush takes the prize and it’s not even close. Nixon (who got only six years) was a disaster in almost every way — to this day I’m stunned his wage & price controls aren’t taught as a textbook case of how not to manage the economy — but he had real and long-lasting accomplishments as well, including opening up China and the SALT I treaty. So the “man who is buried in Grant’s tomb” can rest easy, he’s about to move up a notch.
Cheney, Rove, Rice and other proxies, as well as Bush himself, repeatedly state “history will be the final judge” and they frequently invoke Harry Truman as an example of how perceptions can change over time. Fair enough regarding Truman, who left office the most unpopular president (save Nixon, depending on how you measure the polls) in the 20th century. But, speaking as someone who reads lots of presidential history, Truman was a “special case” in ways that don’t remotely map to Bush. The Bush apologistas would be better served invoking the legacy of Woodrow Wilson, another short-sighted moralistic idealist who left a world-wide mess in his wake.
Bottom Line: George W. Bush is, and will almost certainly remain, one of the worst presidents in the nation’s history. He has in only eight years taken us from a nation of peace and prosperity to endless conflict and quasi-bankruptcy. His successes are few and far between — I’ll give him PEPFAR and the Surge — while his failures are almost innumerable (and likely to grow once the new administration starts turning over the rocks on torture, Cheney’s energy task force, etc).
Offhand I can think of four presidents in the last hundred or so years whose reputations needed and were open to major rehabilitation: Wilson, Truman, Carter and GWB (Nixon needed it but was beyond salvation). I’ll try to write a short summary of the first three over the next couple of weeks. George W will be an ongoing dialogue.
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