Worst President Ever
Is George W. Bush the worst President ever? New polling looks at the issue: “41% said he would go down in history as the worst, the survey of 1,000 people reported. (The poll did not report on the competition for that title among the president’s predecessors).”
The good news for Bush’s reputation is that fully half the population says he’s not the worst. And I think I’ll have to throw in with the “not worst” camp. Conventional wisdom has traditionally put James Buchanan at the bottom of the rankings, and I think it still holds up — nothing Bush has don’t has really tended toward plunging the country into destructive civil war nor has his policy agenda included anything as reprehensible as efforts to defend people’s rights to own other human beings. Buchanan is tough competition and I don’t think anyone will be beating him for some time.
108 Responses to “Worst President Ever”
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August 14th, 2008 at 10:54 am
Warren Harding should also be on the list for the amazing levels of corruption experienced by his administration in addition to his complete lack of leadership or administrative skills.
August 14th, 2008 at 10:56 am
Not that I would say that I am a huge defender of Buchanan but I would have to say that the Civil War was probably going to happpen whether he was in or not. The same can’t be said of Iraq. I realize that the scale of the damage to the US from the Civil War was exponentially worse; I just can’t lay it all at Buchanan’s feet. Buchanan made bad situations worse but Bush seems to have the ability to weave a disastor out of nothing.
August 14th, 2008 at 10:58 am
I pretty much agree with you about Buchanan. And his predecessor, Pierce, was pretty bad, too.
But there’s no obvious way to define “worst” here. Buchanan inherited a country with nearly insoluble problems that could be traced back to previous presidents.
Harrison’s single accomplishment was to keel over dead mere days after his inauguration and leave the country in the hands of an utterly atrocious VP. Maybe that makes Harrison the worst president ever?
August 14th, 2008 at 10:58 am
The problem with your reasoning is that you are evaluating them based on the outcomes, rather than based on how well they performed relative to the difficulties of the problems they faced.
I haven’t read about Buchanon’s presidency in quite a while, but I remember that he faced very difficult problems which he mishandled. Bush, on the other hand, faced very minor problems which he spectacularly mishandled.
Its sort of like saying that a basketball player who misses a contested 3-point shot is worse than one who misses an uncontested layup.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:00 am
Shouldn’t the problems Buchanan faced play into this evaluation? He is trying not to ‘plunge the country into destructive civil war’ by ‘reprehensible efforts to defend people’s rights to own other human beings’ — not that it worked. So ‘moral clarity’ would have been better than Buchanan’s failed attempt at compromise?
By the time we got to 1856 the choice was civil war or succession. Buchanan in the end tried to opt for succession, but couldn’t pull it off.
In any case, I’m inclined to give Buchanan more slack than Bush, Buchanan had a much harder task.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:00 am
If the United States still exists in, say, a decade, I’ll agree with this post.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:00 am
Yeah, but you have to consider the challenges faced in this situation. Buchanan could, I think, be regarded as dealing ineffectively with challenges that had threatened a civil war for some time, and the pro-slavery position was, in his day, just part of the political landscape. I’m not sure he made things much worse. Bush, meanwhile, managed to put the most powerful nation in world history on course to lose two wars, set it’s standard-bearing democracy further down the road to autocracy, and deployed political rhetoric that may be bringing about political violence.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:01 am
Buchanan had even worse nickname than the Decider. People called him Aunt Fannie, as I recall.
Buchanan was a dud because he sat back and let the country go to hell toward the end of his term. And he was a doughface Democrat, who devoted his energy to propping up the slave power despite his northern roots.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:01 am
(I should have said WH Harrison, but the context ought to make it clear I wasn’t referring to his grandson Ben….)
August 14th, 2008 at 11:08 am
BTW, I was out visiting FDR’s Hyde Park estate last year and was trying to find out why FDR’s family were Democrats when sociologically they ought to have been Republicans. It turns out that FDR’s father had been hired by Buchanan while ambassador in London in the 1850s, which contributed to the Roosevelts being Democratic after that.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:08 am
I do think there is a nexus of particularly bad presidencies in the antebellum period.
You’ve got JQA, whose heart was in the right place but who didn’t handle the presidency especially well (kind of the Jimmy Carter of his day), then Andrew Jackson who was popular and superficially successful but with huge negatives (the Reagan of his day, to continue the analogy). Then things just go downhill, and you get into a whole string of mediocre-to-atrocious presidencies for the next two decades, until Lincoln.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:09 am
It is beyond all doubt that the only competition for Dubya as worst president is James Earl Carter whose incompetence has left his predecessors with the evil regime in Iran, which mess will probably be handed to Dubyas’ hapless successor.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:11 am
Hmm. It’s hard to compare presidents from different eras, but I think you might be a little hasty on this one. Buchanan was a really terrible president, but: a.) he didn’t create the problems which underlay the Civil War. He handled them poorly (very poorly), but they had vexed and would continue to vex more able people than he; b.) the early 19th century presidency was hardly as powerful an office as it is today. George Bush is worse because he had more agency to be worse. I think you have to look at opportunity costs – Buchanan is terrible here, but the problem at hand then would’ve been very difficult even for an able Executive, vs Bush, who had exactly the wrong reaction (ie loss of nerve) to 9/11; you have to look at corruption, which is Bush’s actual, patent *program*; you have to look at political/civic damage to the US, which is vast in the case of Bush, both in the country and around the world. And you can’t forget about New Orleans. Buchanan couldn’t have been as spectacularly bad as Bush if he had tried.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:11 am
J Says: You might not approve of his agenda, but Polk was inarguably an effective president, accomplishing pretty much every goal that he set out for himself. I’m not defending his aggressive war against Mexico, but he did it well.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:11 am
Bush is clearly the worst ever because he intended the results we now deplore. The role of Cheney, we now learn, was to provide deniability to Bush. This means they knew what was going to happen, and did it anyway. Katrina was not an accident, 9/11 was not unforseen, and the politicization of Justice was part of the plan. That is not merely incompetent, it is criminal and perhaps treason.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:11 am
Where Bush merits consideration is for the broad range of his screw-ups. Buchanan and Hoover have long ranked near the top of the worst lists for their spectacular botching of one particular area (and for each, as is argued above, as much of it was a matter of the situation inherited as performance).
But Bush rates consideration for the extraordinary scope of his failures (and perhaps the willfullness involved). He’s like a greatest hits compilation of bad presidential traits — Wilson’s overseas messianism and disregard of civil liberties, Nixon’s vindictivess, Harding and Grant’s corruption, LBJ’s foreign policy myopia, and maybe, in retrospect, a touch of Hoover’s economics. This may not rival Buchanan’s leaving us in an inevitable Civil War, but it’s a pretty startling sets of achievements.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:12 am
I think Bush’s ranking will depend on his successor. If he is succeeded by successful President who reverses his worst policies, then Bush will likely go down as a bad but not particularly significant President (call this the Herbert Hoover scenario). But if he is succeeded by someone who doubles down on his worst policies, Bush may join the ranks of the worst Presidents (call this the Franklin Pierce scenario).
But yes, Buchanan’s title is probably safe from Bush, although not necessarily from Bush’s successor (if it is the aforementioned double-down President).
August 14th, 2008 at 11:13 am
One of the big questions in American history is how the US became a great power and successful country with the quality of its 20th century presidents. Why is the US not more like, well, Mexico?
August 14th, 2008 at 11:13 am
The daring call is “not only is Bush 43 the worst President ever, he will always be the worst President ever.” All future Presidents will be able to rest easy on that one.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:13 am
The difference is that Buchanan inherited a country that had the potential for civil war. Bush did not. There is no reason though to think that had Bush been given a country on the brink of civil war, he would have done any better. So in that sense, I think Bush is worse.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:16 am
I vote for Pierce. Wretched as Buchanan was, Pierce set him up for it.
I thoroughly despise Dubya, and can’t conceive of him ever being fully rehabilitated, but if (and only if) Iraq stabilizes, which is at least conceivable, he’ll be rehabilitated in part, and will be understood as being clearly better than the likes of Buchanan and Pierce.
And, SLC – even if we buy into the premise that Iran is *that* bad (which I don’t), shouldn’t his predecessors, who set up the whole situation with our strong support for the Shah, share the blame? It’s the same as Buchanan and Pierce – you can’t blame the whole civil war on either of them…
August 14th, 2008 at 11:16 am
I think we need to wait a few years before definitively concluding that “nothing Bush has [done] has really tended toward plunging the country into destructive civil war”, after we see whether the violent right-wing rhetoric encouraged by Rovian politics leads to more actual violence. Also, torture and secret imprisonment without trial are pretty damn reprehensible.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:20 am
In the context of his times, Bush is worse than Buchanan. Like it or not, defending slavery, even aggressively, was well within the mainstream in Buchanan’s day. And, in any event, it’s doubtful that the civil war could have been prevented by the time Buchanan came into office. He was a terribly bad President to be sure, but he was also a product of a time that assured that we’d have at least one or two Presidents who were abominably bad. Yes, the powder keg blew under Buchanan’s Presidency, and yes, he helped light the fuse, but that keg was going up in flames no matter what.
Torture, forging documents to enable a war of aggression, holding that the President is free to ignore the law just because, using the DOJ as a partisan arm of the Republican party, etc. are innovations of the Bush regime. There is nothing inevitable about the half-assed new American Imperialism we’ve experienced under Bush, or about torture, or about paranoid secrecy, or about the complete absence of a policy apparatus under Bush, or about the gutting of the Fourth Amendment, or about Bush’s repeated efforts to provoke a constitutional crisis through contempt of Congress. Both Bush and Buchanan were supremely incompetent and moral cowards, but Buchanan made a bad situation worse while Bush made a good situation terrible. When Buchanan took office there simply wasn’t going to be a good President until someone managed to win a civil war; when Bush took office there was every opportunity for a successful presidency.
Frankly, even out of the context of his times, you’re too kind to Bush. His institution of torture as state policy is every bit as morally corrupt and pragmatically useless as Buchanan’s defense of the dying institution of slavery. The number and percentage of Iraqi dead and displaced compare quite well to the number of Americans dead and displaced by the American Civil War, and the aftermath in Iraq sure rates to be every bit as miserable and prolonged as was Reconstruction.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:21 am
He’s still got 5 months.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:24 am
By the way, I am sympathetic to the argument that Buchanan was put in a much worse situation than many of his competitors for the worst President title, and therefore is not necessarily the most personally incompetent President ever just because the outcome of his Presidency was so bad.
But as the various Presidential rankings that have been done suggest, reputation isn’t graded on a curve. Rather, rightly or wrongly history will push Presidents who deal with crisis situations to one extreme or the other: if the President does well, he or she will go to the top of the rankings, and if the President does poorly, he or she will go to the bottom. And regardless of personal competence or incompetence, those who presided over quieter times will be pushed to the middle. And since that is how the historical reputation game has always been played, it is unlikely to change.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:25 am
Bush is indeed responsible for system failure in the US with respect to torture and civil liberties. It’s hard to imagine him receiving any rehabilitation in this regard from future generations. He also made a strong attempt to destroy the idea of civil service in this country by allowing ideology to trump ability. This guy has allowed government to be filled by hacks with JDs from Regent University. It’s going to take some time to overcome that problem.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:25 am
I think you could make a rather convincing argument that Bush is the most globally damaging American President. Buchanan’s failures, vast though they were, were almost entirely limited to the Western Hemisphere and, more particularly, the Eastern half of the United States. His irresolution was disastrous, and morally repugnant. Nonetheless, slavery was a problem that predated him, and to blame him for the fact that its bloody resolution began on his watch is not entirely fair.
Bush, by contrast, is President of the World’s unique superpower in an age of frightening globalization. He has faced this challenge by inflicting almost all the damage he could to a rules based approach to foreign policy–an approach seemingly more essential than ever. He has waged a war of his own choosing–which is to say, an aggressive war. (I share John McCain’s horror that such a thing might happen in this, the 21st century.) He has, considering the Geneva Conventions quaint, established a regime of torture that is criminal and deserves to be punished criminally. He has done seemingly all he can to strengthen Iran’s dominance over its own region. He has exacerbated ecological destruction and economic inequality in ways a conscientious person would consider unfathomable. And he has led his country by seeking to divide it, so as to benefit his party’s interests in the shortest term. Lastly, he has moved towards a change in nuclear policy that would countenance the use of tactical nuclear weapons as a quotidian aspect of military strategy.
So, while in an era without slavery (or at least, above board slavery), he opposes slavery–I think we’d all agree this is an unremarkable point of defense. But he has met almost all the problems of his own, highly inflammable age, in a manner that is imprudent, violent, selfish, revolutionary, fantastical, and spineless; it is, needless to add, difficult to be all these things at once.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:26 am
SLC,
I don’t think you can blame Iran on JEC. The Shah was gonna fall, and it was gonna be nasty (for we who propped up the Shah) no matter who was POTUS. The real fault was on Ike’s crack (or would that be “on crack”) foreign policy team* for giving us the Shah in the first place.
*which managed to screw up just so many things — Ike may have given some good speeches and been a good, sturdy Cincinatus-like guarantor of the New Deal (he was a true conservative — he wanted to conserve what was working … unlike today’s reactionaries) domestically, but his foreign policy team very nearly undermined the containment policy so carefully crafted by Truman’s team (and which policy eventually won the Cold War in time for Reagan to take credit).
August 14th, 2008 at 11:29 am
Matt, I hope you knocked on wood after writing that.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:29 am
While I agree with Matt that Buchanan is certain one of our nation’s worst Presidents, he should be considered the worst- and honor I believe belongs to our current President.
Yes, Buchanan did (less than) nothing while the country slid towards Civil War; however, his inaction at the time, while inexcusable, was not the cause of that war. Also, while his position on slavery was similarly abhorrent, he was not the only President who had supported that wholly immoral institution.
And finally, Buchanan was President when our nation had little influence in the world, and therefore the damage caused by his incompetence did not have great impact beyond our own borders. Similarly, because the rest of the world was not paying very much attention to our domestic politics, his policies did little harm to the then new “idea” that was America (an “idea” that Lincoln so masterfully and eloquently defined for future generations of Americans and the world in the following years).
Bush, however, has not only inflicted great damage on American credibility around the world and on America’s status the world’s leader on human rights, he has made a mockery of our reputation as a nation of laws. His policies have led to the deaths of over 4,000 American servive-people and of tens to hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians; all while wasting half a trillion dollars (and counting) of tax payers money and making us less safe (e.g. by allowing Al Qaeda to reconstitute). And I have not even touched on the illegal wire-tapping, the cronyism, or the politization of the Department of Justice, Katrina, and his Administration’s refusal to act on or even admit the existence of global warming.
No, when you think about the actual costs involved, and the magnitude of those costs for our country and the world, Buchanan does not really come close to being this country’s worst President.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:29 am
DAS: Ike did not nearly undermine containment; rather, he preserved it by recognizing limits on American power and its ability to spend freely forever. When Truman left office, he had committed the US to fighting communism everywhere, which was not possible over the long haul. That does not justify the CIA’s actions in Iran, but that plan was on the books–with the help of Great Britain–before Ike won the presidency.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:29 am
Personally, I think that Andrew Jackson is hands down the worst president ever. This article gives a pretty good rundown as to why.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:35 am
It’s important to remember too the kind of nation Bush inherited in 2001: The economy was strong, we were at peace, we were running a strong surplus. The 2000 election was remarkably issue-less, because there really weren’t that many problems for the federal government to deal with. The Clinton administration had done a good job fighting terrorism, and tried very hard to warn the incoming group about the problems that still lay out there.
Bush took over the nation at one of the strongest points in its history, and has made everything worse – in many cases, much much worse.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:39 am
Ike did not nearly undermine containment; rather, he preserved it by recognizing limits on American power and its ability to spend freely forever. – taskerbliss
In this way, I agree Ike did preserve containment: he was indeed a true conservative committed to, well, conserving things!. BTW — was the “military industrial speech” in part a warning about what kind of military build-up JFK might bring?
What I was referring to were the exploits of the Dulles’ brothers and, pace Ike’s aforementioned farewell address, his turning the blind eye to the CIA being used as an enforcer for multinational corporations (the plan may have been on the books for Operation Ajax, but would Truman really have given that the go-ahead? I somehow have the impression that Truman had the ear of some pro-Mossadegh types …). And the Dulles’ brothers sudden bursts of high-mindedness in dealing with Nassar (who made good in his — if you don’t give me $$$, I’ll go Soviet), which helped ensure the permanent-ness of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by superimposing the Cold War onto it, etc.
There were many, many damaging mistakes with very long lasting consequences due to Ike’s letting essentially the fox guard the henhouse. Ike may have warned (aptly so) about the military-industrial complex, but foreign policy during his presidency was marked by a tendancy for domination by moneyed interests (interestingly, his VP Nixon’s foreign policy would be similarly marked at certain key junctures — e.g. Chile).
August 14th, 2008 at 11:40 am
Please don’t make W think he has nothing left to lose over the remainder of his term. Let him think he’s done a fine job, done well enough already, can walk out the door with head held high, etc. We don’t need him trying to make a “hail mary” shot (at Iran or other convenient demon) to salvage his reputation.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:44 am
Ike was not the tool of monied interests. Are you referring to the CIA’s action in Guatemala? I have never bought the idea that the US was acting on behalf of United Fruit. The main concern there–and it was a misguided one–was fear that Jacobo Arbenz Guzman was a Soviet stooge. See Richard Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:44 am
The Clinton administration had done a good job fighting terrorism – Tom Nawrocki
As the wingnuts will appraise us, the Clinton administration actually did a mneh job of fighting terrorism.
What the wingnuts conveniently forget is that the reason why Clinton did such a mneh job is because every time he tried to actually fight terrorism, the wingnuts started screaming “the tail wags the dog!” … nobody “stood behind the CiC” (it would be way to tinfoil hat paranoid to suggest that maybe there was an orchestrated campaign here to protect Saudi interests from Clinton snooping?).
Flash forward to the Bush years. Bush ain’t doin’ so hot because he, well, has the reverse Midas touch. And then he hits the “trifecta”. And the “tail wags the dog!” crowd suddenly, if you would so much as suggest that Bush was doing things for domestic political gain, would start shouting “support your CiC” (whose CiC? I’m a civvy. and so are all those chickenhawks!). I guess after 9/11 everything is different …
August 14th, 2008 at 11:46 am
. . . nothing Bush has don’t has really tended toward plunging the country into destructive civil war nor has his policy agenda included anything as reprehensible as efforts to defend people’s rights to own other human beings.
Er–In defending people’s rights to own other human beings, was he all that different from his fourteen predecessors? Even Lincoln, who hated slavery, defended the right of people to own slaves as a matter of law [making him hated by the real abolitionists] until he was able to figure out a way to tie Emancipation to the Union’s war aims and press for a constitutional amendment outlawing it. And Buchanan actually opposed secession.
Buchanan had two fatal problems, though. First, he went so far in defense of slaveholders’ rights that he began undercutting his own party’s position on slavery in the territories, endorsing the Dred Scott decision and insisting that slavery be imposed on a territory [Kansas] that plainly didn’t want it. In so doing, he alienated Stephen Douglas and most other northern Democrats, in turn causing Douglas to defend the doctrine of popular sovereignty as permitting the people of a territory to keep slavery out of it. This doctrine, which flatly contradicted the southern view that slavery could go anywhere in the territories that slaveholders wanted it to go, led to the fateful split in the Democratic Party in 1860. Second, while he opposed secession, he didn’t think the federal government could actually do anything about it. The crisis of the Union would have occurred anyway, because it was rooted in fatal flaws of the original constitutional order–its implicit endorsement of slavery and its studied ambiguity about the perpetuity of the Union. But it’s at least conceivable that the Union would have been preserved, and slavery ended, at less frightful a cost. That the cost was so frightful–and arguably still being paid–has a lot to do with Buchanan’s fecklessness.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:51 am
I have never bought the idea that the US was acting on behalf of United Fruit. The main concern there–and it was a misguided one–was fear that Jacobo Arbenz Guzman was a Soviet stooge. See Richard Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala. – taskerbliss
I dunno. I guess I need to read that book.
It seems rather odd to me, though, that all these democratically elected leaders who were feared to be Soviet stooges were standing in the way of US moneyed interests … I doubt if Ike himself was consciously a tool of the moneyed interests. Possibly even the Dulles brothers were not. But at some level, people, maybe even subconsciously, realized what side their bread was buttered on … and suddenly became a little too willing to believe that So-And-So was a Soviet stooge … well, because it was profitable for some to believe that.
At some level, the military-industrial complex speech was a self-critique, wasn’t it?
August 14th, 2008 at 11:53 am
Just want to point out that Matt missed the obvious Simpsons headline for this post:
Worst. President. Ever.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:54 am
Until someone shows me Buchanan Executive Orders demanding the brutal torture and imprisonment without trial of his enemies I’ll rank Bush worse than him.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:59 am
nor has his policy agenda included anything as reprehensible as efforts to defend people’s rights to own other human beings.
Eh. That doesn’t really distinguish Buchanan from his fourteen predecessors. Hell, Lincoln also defended (some) people’s rights to own other human beings until pretty late in the day. This is because said right was, unfortunately, enshrined in the constitution, and this was widely recognized. If this makes one our worst president, then all of the first fifteen presidents qualify as our fifteen worst, I think. Obviously slavery was the awful original sin of the American polity, but I don’t see that Buchanan should be held as more responsible for it than Washington or Jefferson. At least Buchanan himself didn’t own any slaves.
Buchanan is seen as the absolute worst because even within that framework, he was notoriously pro-slavery, and because his pro-slavery actions, designed to preserve the union, actually led us to the brink of the Civil War. He broke his own party over the issue by siding with the most extreme pro-slavery elements within it over the Lecompton Constitution and then proceeded to use all his efforts to insure an overt schism within the party out of personal pique against Stephen Douglas; and that once, as per design, Lincoln won the election he was largely ineffectual in opposing secession.
August 14th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
At some level, the military-industrial complex speech was a self-critique, wasn’t it?–It absolutely was. Eisenhower realized that he had not done nearly enough to restrain government spending on defense and in curbing the growth of the American national security state. He did try. Eisenhower, benefitting from U-2 recon that the the public did not have–was one of the few voices of reason following Sputnik, but he could not hold back the tide of defense spending; hence, he only balanced 2 budgets in 8 years.
What he did accomplish was to rein in all the crazy talk about rollback. He did not involve the US in the East Berlin uprising of 1953, he did not run guns into Hungary in 1956, and he did not put boots on the ground in Vietnam following Dienbienphu. And a lot of people wanted him to. Also, Eisenhower certainly believed that US security and prosperity would benefit from the spread of capitalism across the globe. I can’t think of a single president after Woodrow Wilson who did not believe that. If that makes him a tool of The Money Power, then he has a lot of company among Democrats and Republicans alike. In this regard, he was not so much a tool of capitalist agents but a believer in the idea that with capitalism comes freedom. Bill Clinton certainly fits that mold.
August 14th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
I think that presidents can’t be individuated quite like that. Take Bush’s stupid policy towards Georgia. The conditions for that policy were laid down by the Clinton administration, which was desperate to find other pipelines and sources of oil and natural gas outside of Russia for Europe. Why this obsession? Because Clinton himself inherited a vision of the U.S. as not just a superpower, but an aggressor interested in all aspects of global life. The “indispensable” power, in the comic phrase of the day. This role is not for the benefit of the average American, although it does please the contingent of foaming at the mouth white guys dittoing Limbaugh. It is for the benefit of the business oligarchs and the court society of D.C. – in much the way Louis XIV’s wars were fought solely for Louis XIV’s glory, and devastated the French population with neglect, high taxes, and a deteriorating productive base. There has always been a tension between being a democracy and being a ’superpower.” Bush marks the moment when the cost of being a superpower to the democratic infrastructure becomes visible. No doubt Obama, the probable next president, is going to have a tough time getting past the continuous barrage of aggressive bs from the media elite that simply love superpowerdom, and have a cool contempt for democracy.
August 14th, 2008 at 12:04 pm
I can’t help thinking that any president who derides the Consititution as a “goddamned piece of paper” is the worst on that basis alone.
Buchanan did not wreak the fundamental destructive transformation of America that Bush did. He inherited stewardship of a nation that had countenanced slavery from its inception. He was presented with an imminent train wreck that he was unwilling or unable to stop. He was not out to start of enable a Civil War.
But Bush and his cronies set to out to deliberately undermine the government, laws, institutions, and security of the United States. The damage they have done has been by design, not by accident.
Bush is in a completely different category from Buchanan. Buchanan is merely a bad president. Bush, though, is a traitor.
August 14th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
“But Bush and his cronies set to out to deliberately undermine the government, laws, institutions, and security of the United States. The damage they have done has been by design, not by accident.”–Rodd McCorley
There is an element of truth to this, and it is a powerful one. I disagree in that I believe Bush and Cheney truly believe that they are doing the right thing. Their contempt for limits on their own power is grounded in a sincere belief in executive authority and a sincere contempt for the Bill of Rights. It’s hard to square this belief-set with their self-same professed belief in small government conservatism, but I think they manage to square it in their minds. It’s classic cognitive dissonance. So maybe the best frame is to think of Buchanan as a passive fool and Bush as an aggressive one. You get similar lamentable results.
August 14th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
Here is one way to look at this. Imagine US history with a much more competent President in the White House in 1857 and 2001.
In 1857, a more competent President probably avoids some of the mess over Kansas (although the Act was passed prior to Buchanan), but Dred Scott probably happens anyway. Buchanan wretchedly interfered with the vote, but it was effectively a 7-2 decision, mostly on sectional lines by justices that were entirely appointed by someone other than Buchanan.
Does the Civil War happen without Buchanan? Almost certainly. No matter who was in the White House you still get either a free soiler like Fremont who gets us the Civil War 4 years earlier under less competent leadership, or a southern sympathizer who delays the conflict without resolving it while increasing northern dissatisfaction, or a compromiser like Douglas who pleases no one.
But if Bush loses in 2000, you get no Iraq War, no balooning deficit, an effective response to Katrina, no torture, no return of the Imperial Presidency, and a more effective prosecution of the war in Afghanistan.
Buchanan faced a bad situation and avoided solving it for four years. Bush faced the best situation an American President has ever had and screwed it up.
August 14th, 2008 at 12:22 pm
MY is on target here. James Buchanan did not merely support maintaining slavery in the south; he personally lobbied a Supreme Court justice to vote with the majority in the Dred Scott decision, which Buchanan enthusiastically supported. Buchanan would have had no issue seeing slavery nationalized. As South Carolina, with others following, committed open rebellion and treason, Buchanan did nothing. He didn’t really think he was allowed to do anything about it, and he didn’t know what to do anyway.
Fortunately, Abraham Lincoln, who adamantly opposed the Dred Scott decision, did know what to do. Excellent presidents do not always follow poor ones, such as FDR following Hoover or Lincoln following Buchanan, but hopefully that will happen this time.
August 14th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
# tom c Says:
August 14th, 2008 at 10:56 am
Not that I would say that I am a huge defender of Buchanan but I would have to say that the Civil War was probably going to happpen whether he was in or not. The same can’t be said of Iraq. I realize that the scale of the damage to the US from the Civil War was exponentially worse; I just can’t lay it all at Buchanan’s feet. Buchanan made bad situations worse but Bush seems to have the ability to weave a disastor out of nothing.
Right. Buchanan inherited a terrible situation and let it degenerate to catastrophic. Bush inherited a fine situation and actively dragged it down to awful.
August 14th, 2008 at 12:37 pm
RE Polk (comment 14) and Jackson (comment 32), I would characterize them as presidents who were mostly successful in pursuing their bad agendas.
Which brings us back to the question, how do you define the “worst president ever”?
Most of the argument in this thread seems to be about whether you take into account the starting position (Buchanan inherited a mess, and made it much worse; Bush inherited a pretty good situation and also made it much worse).
But another question is how to you disentangle (and evaluate) the effects of competence vs agenda. Is a president who is successful in implementing a bad agenda better, or worse, than a president who pursues a similarly bad agenda in a more incompetent fashion?
August 14th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Matt engages in a bit of presentism here; a pro-slavery position was a culturally acceptable stand in the mid 19th century. Certainly, today we see it rightly as reprehensible, but it wasn’t then, to a large percentage of citizens. And if we judge Buchanan by the slavery issue, what are we to think of, say, Thomas Jefferson? Much of what he said about race and slavery is shockingly repugnant.
What will people in 150 years think about today’s cultural position in America of, for example, the death penalty?
August 14th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
DAS Says:
August 14th, 2008 at 11:51 am
It seems rather odd to me, though, that all these democratically elected leaders who were feared to be Soviet stooges were standing in the way of US moneyed interests … I doubt if Ike himself was consciously a tool of the moneyed interests. Possibly even the Dulles brothers were not. But at some level, people, maybe even subconsciously, realized what side their bread was buttered on … and suddenly became a little too willing to believe that So-And-So was a Soviet stooge … well, because it was profitable for some to believe that.
Dead on. Read “Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala” by Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer. Allende in Chile was a Soviet agent because he nationalized the copper mines US companies owned, and Arbenz of Guatemala became a Communist tool when he nationalized some of United Fruit’s fallow land.
August 14th, 2008 at 12:46 pm
J,
I’ve been thinking about that distinction as well as this conversation has unfolded, and ironically I think one of the things that may save Bush from an all-time-worst title is that his incompetence may actually have stood in the way of achieving his agenda on any sort of permanent basis. Again, though, that all depends on his immediate successor.
August 14th, 2008 at 12:53 pm
I say this is a pointless argument. This is a judgment only history can render.
August 14th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Aleks: Read “Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala” by Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer.
That book is hopelessly dated and effectively refuted by all the scholarship in its aftermath-see Richard Immerman, The CIA in Guatemala and Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope.Gleijeses differs from Immerman primarily in that he argues that Arbenz was a real communist. Give me a break.
August 14th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
I’m sorry, but Harding, Grant and Old Buck can finally have a rest. Dubya, who is the exemplar for malfeasance, corruption, and incompetence will stand as the worst until the last president of the Republic. The notion that the sectional conflict which began to sprout in 1820 and blossomed into disunion and civil war 40 years later would have been somehow avoided by the string of weak (except for Polk) party men, Whig or Democrat, who served after Jackson, is fantasy. Jackson was the only man to be elected to two terms in that period. No person after him had the stature or the will to do what was necessary to forestall civil war. And what would that have been anyway? Preemptive war on the South in 1848? Congress was basically programmed into a stalemate by the Compromise of 1820, after which there was a tacit understanding that each new free state admitted to the Union would be matched by the admission of a corresponding slave state. And honestly, could Old Buck have raised an army and subjugated South Carolina in the four months between secession and Lincoln’s inauguration? Simply, no. So go thee to thy long-delayed rest, Aunt Fanny.
August 14th, 2008 at 1:15 pm
Clearly it was Andrew Johnson. He basically ensured that there would be no Reconstruction and that Jim Crow would reign in the South. He should have been removed from office.
August 14th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
And if we judge Buchanan by the slavery issue, what are we to think of, say, Thomas Jefferson?
Well, Jefferson had some other good points, whereas Buchanan not so much.
Also, opposition to slavery was much more marginal in 1800 than it was in 1856.
Finally, I’d also say Jefferson is widely overrated as president — most of his value came from his accomplishments earlier in life (the Declaration, etc.) while his presidency was not among the greatest.
August 14th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
I don’t think there’s really any debating it. The worst president BY FAR in the Republic’s history was Andrew Johnson. As others have noted above, the country was sliding into Civil War with or without Buchanan. But Andrew Johnson occupied the office at exactly the moment when the country most needed a strong, progressive leader. I’m tempted to throw Grant in with Johnson for similar reasons. Imagine the far happier century and a half the country might have experienced had Lincoln lived, or if a different man had occupied the White House in the days after Appomattox — a binder and healer of the nation’s wounds.
August 14th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
Maybe we can all just agree that Bush, Buchanan, [Andrew] Johnson, Pierce, Tyler, and Harding were all really, really bad presidents?
August 14th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
I agree with my former Professor Eric Foner: Until Bush, Andrew Johnson was the worst US president. Buchanan is now the third worst. Who says that W has not been good for anything: he helped Johnson’s and Buchanan’s standing.
August 14th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
nor has his policy agenda included anything as reprehensible as efforts to defend people’s rights to own other human beings.
His policy agenda has included — and very determinedly so — denying half of us the right to own our own bodies.
Some of us rank that pretty high on the ‘worst of all’ scale.
August 14th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
Ironically in the context of the current election:
John Quincy Adams, James Buchanan and Herbert Hoover were three of the most “experienced” presidents at the time of their election. John Quincy Adams was a great man and a great contributor to US history but a notoriously ineffective president. Buchanan was, as has been noted here, by most accounts the worst president ever. Hoover was a failure although not as bad as most people think
Abraham Lincoln had to have been the least experienced President. Other than one term as a Congressman and a career as a country lawyer he had no experience. Many people believe him to have been our “greatest” President.
Hoover’s failing was not his economic policies (most of his proposals were enacted by Roosevelt as part of the New Deal and Roosevelt got credit). Hoover’s failing was his inability to inspire or even to understand the need to inspire in the face of the depression.
Lincoln was successful despite his inexperience because he was able to learn, listened to a variety of viewpoints, understood the need for moderation in his rhetoric, believed in his own ability to sort out what needed to be done, was willing to compromise to work with his opposition without losing sight of the real issues, knew how to make other people think his ideas originated with them,understood the need to inspire, and he was able to inspire.
If an analysis of the qualities that led to success or failure in past presidents is at all relevant (and I’m not sure that it is), then Obama has the tools to be one of the greatest presidents in our history and McCain would almost certainly be one of the worst.
August 14th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
I gotta go with Bush.
Buchanan was unsuccessful at avoiding the war to come. No gold star for that, but it’s hard to imagine that any president would have kept the union together, ended slavery, and avoided war.
Bush inherited peace and prosperity and twisted the outrage from a tragic attack on this country into the casus belli for launching an unprovoked war in the most dangerous part of the world against a country that had nothing to do with the attack. The cost of that tragedy is yet to be told (though the human cost to Americans doesn’t doesn’t compare to the Civil War). That’s just the beginning when it comes to Bush, and contrary to the cover of this week’s Newsweek, there is very little that he got right.
Buchanan couldn’t stop the country when it was heading toward the cliff. Bush took the wheel when we going safely down the highway, and after a crash decided not to get us back on the road but to steer us into a ditch.
August 14th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
Poor inept Buchanan. The problem for him was that there was little if anything he could do to stop the division of the country. Lincoln found this out right away, and floundered about trying to prevent disunion. In the end, Lincoln pushed the Confederate authorities into a position that gave them little choice but to resort to arms unless they wanted to lose face with their own people. The war came….but why blame Buchanan. He did not create the situation that plagued the country. Yes, he was weak, but who had the strength to prevent disunion and avoid war? No one….period.
Bush, on the other hand, has had basically a free hand and the power to go with it. More than anyone else, he has created the country’s current terrible situation. His lies and bad judgments brought on a disastrous war. He has done his best to ruin lawful federal authority in many areas which his pig-headed “ideology” finds uncongenial, his oath of office notwithstanding. By contrast, Buchanan merely could not assert and uphold federal authority in one part of a society where it was not generally accepted anyway. Bush has trashed reason and science in the name of a primitive religiosity. He has corrupted the justice system. He has brought the country to the brink of bankruptcy and economic ruin. Etc Etc. The list is long. These are acts of commission, not Buchananesque omission, and they have been committed willfully and in utter disregard of reality and common sense.
For those to whom Bush’s grossly destructive effects on our society are not yet fully apparent, wait a few years. Rightly or wrongly, Buchanan gets blamed for the Civil War which came after his term. Give Bush’s handiwork the same chance to show its hellacious consequences.
August 14th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
George W. Bush’s greatest achievement as president? The federal Do-Not-Call List.
I think that says it all. Worst ever. Thing is, it would be much more obvious if there were a political opposition and political media willing to address his administration’s shredding of the constitution, embrace of torture and extrajudicial detention, corruption of the career government, politicisation of the legal process…
Bush wants history to vindicate him, but I think it will condemn an American populace that had the impeachment process written down for them but didn’t know what it was for.
August 14th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
I would go with the Jared Diamond framing, ie., resources (see Guns, Germs, & Steel). The vast natural attributes of the U.S. before and during the industrial revolution, starting with oil, made that a foregone conclusion even with a succession of presidential fuckups.
August 14th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
A very important point others are only touching: Buchanan, Harding, and Johnson all dealt incompetently and corruptly with issues within the constitutional framework. In 1860, the debate was over what the constitution meant. Could a democracy could function if on the one hand, someone who felt abused could leave the union, and, other the other, the majority who felt slavery was evil and corrupting could be bullied and dominated by a slave-owning minority. In 1920, Harding stood for the traditions of plutocracy, in which democracy could be followed in public as long as the corrupt elite could run some parts of the government and indulge in aristocratic privilege behind the scenes.
Bush is the first president, ever, to actively try to overthrow the society created by the founding fathers. Those men wrote the rule of law into our constitution and our culture because they knew how powerful factions indifferent to law could take away freedom and property. They had experience and history with governments that tortured and imprisoned on the whims of strong men, soldiers, and thugs.
Other presidents have danced around the edges of breaching the constitution because they did not want their names associated with foreign tyrants and corrupt, despotic regimes, both because it might get them overthrown and because, no matter how debauched they were, they believed in that original understanding. Bush, Cheney and Addington are the first faction to advocate abandoning the original constitutional principles, in allowing every law to be ignored whenever righteous men (themselves) think it necessary, allowing any lie to be told to anyone, including congress, the courts, and their own followers, because they don’t take democracy itself seriously. They view any discussion with anyone or any institution outside their little ruling clique an annoyance, and every public statement a waste of time. They only speak to the rest of us to put us off or shut us up so they can back to running the country. Even the most corrupt machine politician you can name had at least some respect for or fear of democracy. Bush and Cheney have neither.
They are the people the constitution was written to contain and restrain. Whenever Madison and Hamilton debated how democracy might be destroyed, these are the people they had in mind, just wearing suits and ties instead of crowns and uniforms. These are the same creatures who overthrow “failed” democracies in Europe, South America, and Africa. They make the same arguments, follow the same reasoning.
That by itself should qualify Bush as the worst president ever.
August 14th, 2008 at 3:37 pm
Polls like this are silly, because most people who aren’t historians or history buffs are notoriously clueless about history that predates their lifetimes. I would bet fairly serious money that a majority of Americans, in a statistically legitimate poll, couldn’t identify three 19th-century presidents – Lincoln, Jefferson and uh…uh…[buzz, time's up].
A more useful poll would ask respondents about the best and worst presidents of their lifetimes, and limit the sample to people who’ve been around long enough to judge more than two or three presidents. Such a poll could give us some insight on the public’s view of the relative merits of, say, Truman or Eisenhower vs. Reagan, and the relative demerits of Nixon vs. Carter vs. G.W. Bush.
Laying blame for the Civil War on Buchanan lets off the hook a full generation of presidents who preceded him – Jackson, Van Buren, W.H. Harrison, Tyler, Polk, Taylor, Fillmore and Pierce – and did little or nothing to address slavery and regional economic rivalries that divided the country. In fact, the only vocally antislavery president of the 19th century prior to Lincoln was John Quincy Adams.
Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, author of the infamous Dred Scott decision, was appointed to the Supreme Court by Jackson, 20 years before Buchanan became president.
August 14th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Ooops, that was supposed to be
I’m not sure that natural resource advantages fully explain US performance relative to Latin America, thought it is true that the US South and Southwest, similar in resource endowment (climate and disease load) to Latin America and Mexico, were substantially poorer parts of the country until recently.
A reminder to look at Gavin Wright’s work again. For instance
Resource-Based Growth Past and Present, a more informative writer on this question than Jared Diamond.
August 14th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
I would go with the Jared Diamond framing, ie., resources (see Guns, Germs, & Steel). The vast natural attributes of the U.S. before and during the industrial revolution, starting with oil, made that a foregone conclusion even with a succession of presidential fuckups. – lobstakilla
I dunno. Many countries have plenty of resources and don’t do so well in spite (or perhaps because) of being resource rich. Indeed, a resource rich country will find its comparative advantage to be (or international lending institutions will declare its comparative advantage to be … thus choking off any access to capital for industrialization) in extracting those resources and importing everything else.
Indeed, this is what happened in our own South — the South basically was un-developed until the New Deal because capitalists wouldn’t loan money to Southern interests to do anything outside of the accepted “comparative advantage” of the South to be an agricultural and backward region.
August 14th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
“…nothing Bush has [done] has really tended toward plunging the country into destructive civil war…”
What about Iraq?
August 14th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
Indeed, this is what happened in our own South — the South basically was un-developed until the New Deal because capitalists wouldn’t loan money to Southern interests to do anything outside of the accepted “comparative advantage” of the South to be an agricultural and backward region.
A major reason that the South was behind the North was the legacy of slavery and discrimination. Not that discrimination wasn’t a problem in the North, but less so. You essentially had a large part of the population that was shut out of most parts of the economy. That’s why there was the Great Migration from the South to the North in the first part of the 20th century.
August 14th, 2008 at 5:06 pm
I agree with those posters above who criticize A. Johnson. Growing up in the south, the story of reconstruction was always told with “the evil radical republicans” and Johnson gracefully letting the south back in, no harm no foul. I read books saying the 14th amendment was illegitimately forced into the constitution. As opposed to say Buchanan, Johnson had an opportunity to address the causes of the civil war within southern society and failed, and blacks still couldn’t vote for 100 years after that. But the dominant narrative has been a whitewash; remember that one of JFK’s “profiles in courage” was the one senator who stood up against the “radical reconstructionists” during A. Johnson’s impeachment.
August 14th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
I meant that the players were the evil Republicans and Johnson, and that Johnson let the South off, contra the Republicans.
August 14th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
The traditional view on how Mexico fell so far behind the United States–with a 100 year head start–is the burden of one of the most debilitating and corrupt caste systems in Europe. How much this has been debunked in recent years I couldn’t say. Suffice it to say that when you read about bigotry, corruption, poverty, and oppression in colonial New Spain, it sounds depressingly familiar to problems in modern Latin America.
Spain itself barely got on board for the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution in Europe, and Franco was only the latest in a long tradition of conservative elites more worried about keeping the peasant trash in their places than trying to improve their education and opportunities for the good of the country. Mexico still needs to shake all that tradition off.
Likewise, we have the in-between land of Dixie, south of the Ohio, north of Mexico, crippled by a caste system of its own creation: wealthy property owners on top, small middle class, impoverished white farmers under them, and even more inpoversihed blacks under them. The region was obviously lagging in economic development back in the 1830s, stayed behind under Jim Crow, and only developed “normal” western divisions of wealth and power with the coming of the civil rights movement and air conditioning.
August 14th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
On the question of experience, I think it would be well to consider the respective leaders of the Northern States and the Confederacy in 1861. As has been mentioned, Lincoln had virtually no military experience, other then a brief stint as a militiaman in an action against Native Americans. Jefferson Davis, on the othe hand, was a graduate of West Point, a veteran of the Mexican War and a former Secretary of War. Based solely on experience, nobody in his right mind in 1861 would have preferred Lincoln. But the upshot was that, as General Fuller puts it, Lincoln was a great war leader and Davis was a dried up old stick more suited to the seminary then the commander in chiefs’ position.
The difference between the two men is simple. Lincoln had a fine mind who quickly grasped the elements of military strategy (in fact, he showed a better grasp of the subject matter then any of his generals until Grant took over). Davis was a dolt who exhibited little such understanding.
What does all of this have to do with the current situation of McCain vs Obama? We know that McCain does not have a fine mind, based on his academic record at the Naval Academy and previously. In addition, McCain has demonstrated little intellectual accomplishment during his Senate career. We know that Obama was an honor graduate of Columbia and Harvard Law School, as well as being editor of the Harvard Law Review during his sojourn there. We don’t know if that means that Obama has a fine mind but the evidence seems to indicate that he may be a pretty smart fellow. The question is, does he have good judgement in addition to being smart?
August 14th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
Wilson was the worst president. Just about every bad thing Bush has done, Wilson did bigger.
August 14th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
Wilson defined modern global foreign policy. He might have gotten the details wrong, but his framework was spot on. Collective security amplifies national power. You can’t blame him for WWII or Iraq.
He also supervised the creation of the Federal Reserve System, probably the most significant financial reform of the 20th century.
August 14th, 2008 at 6:32 pm
I’ve still got to go with Andrew Jackson as the worst president ever: the mere fact of saying, in all seriousness, “The Supreme Court has made their ruling; now let them try and enforce it” would be enough even if the policy involved in that defiance wasn’t genocidal…
August 14th, 2008 at 7:04 pm
In contrast to Buchanan, President Bush has brought on a lot of his own difficulties. He had the entire world behind him after the September 11 attacks, and turned it into almost universal scorn. He dropped the ball in Afghanistan and invaded Iraq on false pretenses. His negligence and appointment of hacks drowned New Orleans. He arrested Jose Padilla, an American citizen, on American soil in violation of the Fourth Amendment, and imprisoned and tortured him into insanity.
He’s blown two opportunities to be a great president: when he was elected, and after 9/11. It’s odd to remember now, but he took office promising to unite a divided country, and could have given an inaugural address like Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. He could have said the 9/11 attacks were an attack on all of us. Instead, he used both occasions to divide and attack.
Most bad presidents are bad because they either start illegal wars or are incompetent. Polk started the Mexican-American War on false pretenses, McKinley started the Spanish-American War on false pretenses, LBJ escalated the Vietnam War on false pretenses. US Grant’s administration was corrupt, Harding had Teapot Dome, Nixon’s administration was basically a crime ring. Bush has a zesty mix of illegal aggression and malfeasance. He’s the worst so far, and likely the worst ever.
August 14th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
I agree with Matt. Folks who argue that Buchanan had difficult problems, etc., are being very kind to him. From what I’ve read, Buchanan more or less actively favored the South, and seemed to even favor secession. And he was very pro-slavery. In other words, as President, he was not only a racist bastard, but a traitor. That’s really hard to beat.
Wilson also really sucked. Resegregated the federal government, lots of idiotic imperial adventures, massive civil rights violations, utterly incompetent handling of the League of Nations vote — he’s pretty hard to love.
We’ve just had lots of awful Presidents, is the truth. So it’s hard to declare W the worst. He’s plenty bad, though. I mean, next to him, Kennedy,Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I and Clinton all look good. That’s saying something.
August 14th, 2008 at 9:33 pm
C’mon, Bush is definitely the Worst. President. Ever.
People haven’t been mentioning that he stole the 2000 election. So unlike previous terrible presidents, he didn’t even have the justification of being chosen by the people.
Also bear in mind that George W. Bush got briefing in the summer of 2001 about the danger of terrorists using airplanes in an attack. So 9/11 can also arguably be laid at his door…
Plus there has been his disastrous stalling in international climate change negotiations. The entire world has basically been waiting around for 8 years for a new US administration that doesn’t deny climate change – a waste of precious time. Depending on how bad the impacts of global warming are, this may actually be the most damaging long run outcome of the Bush presidency.
The man really has wreaked an incredible amount of havoc in eight years.
August 14th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
> I realize that the scale of the damage to the
> US from the Civil War was exponentially worse
Really? I tend to think that the Iraq fiasco will end up destroying the United States, or at the very least end forever the leading position it has held in world affairs since 1850 or so. The corrosive poison that Cheney has smeared on the Constitution/BOR is similarly although less spectacularly destructive.
Cranky
August 15th, 2008 at 1:12 am
One of the big questions in American history is how the US became a great power and successful country with the quality of its 19th century presidents.
An obvious point is that at least until 1900 or so, it didn’t matter quite so much that, to paraphrase Bryce, pretty much every president after the initial crop of founders was mediocre at best. The balance of power across the branches was differently distributed.
For those to whom Bush’s grossly destructive effects on our society are not yet fully apparent, wait a few years.
Agreed. Whatever we think of Bush now, in 20 years time, it’ll seem an order of magnitude worse by its long-term consequences.
August 15th, 2008 at 4:02 am
Ironically, if you read Buchanan’s own writings, what was crucially important to him was following the letter of the constitution despite the great moral arguments regarding slavery and emancipation. The constitution, and by extension, the Union was enshrined in his mind as a holy text never to be defiled or ignored. He’s been pilloried for 150 years based on this blind devotion to a few misguided clauses. Bush, on the otherhand, has spent the last 8 years doing what Lincoln (effectively) did: pissing on the parts of the constitution that got in the way of his moralistic mission.
Isn’t it interesting how important context is to these arguments?
August 15th, 2008 at 10:31 am
It was mentioned in the first few comments, and I’m sure several times throughout, but inheriting slavery is a pretty bad hand to be dealt to any president. President Bush was handed a good hand and made nearly every mistake/took every bad action that presented itself.
October 5th, 2008 at 8:54 pm
Bush is the worst president in American history. Bush facilitated the 9/11 attacks. Subsequently, Bush lied to Congress and the American people relative to the reasons for invading Iraq. Bush purposefully misled Congress and the American people. Then, Bush murdered more than 4,000 United States service members. And Bush wounded more than 30,000 United States service members. In torturing prisoners of war, Bush patently violated the Geneva Convention. Bush unlawfully wiretapped United States citizens. In using “signing statements” to challenge hundreds of laws passed by Congress, Bush violated the Constitution. Bush has ignored global warming. Bush is guilty of criminal negligence relative to the response to Hurricane Katrina. Bush disobeys our democratic values and Constitution. Bush is a disgrace to the United States.
Submitted by Andrew Yu-Jen Wang
B.S., Summa Cum Laude, 1996
Messiah College, Grantham, PA
October 14th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
The near collapse of U.S. financial system because of Bush’s anti-regulatory policies has guaranteed that Bush will go down as the worst president in US history. With all of Dubya’s crimes and failures mentioned above, the massive loss of wealth in the crash of financial markets and banks has sealed his fate.
November 11th, 2008 at 3:08 am
A list of Bush’s failures would fill up volumes. By any measure, America is worse off. Let’s see: National deficit, worldwide favorability rating, war crimes, illegal domestic surveillance, torture, Katrina, ignoring science, illegal invasion and occupation, Walter Reid,
January 2nd, 2009 at 7:56 pm
W and his admin. will easily go down as the worst ever.
I am not political in the least as I have just not noticed how alot of “policies” of prezs since J Carter have affected me in everyday day to day life. Not until W have I noticed society change in its mores and morals and head in a completely wrong direction. I found reading all the above entries extremely interesting and really learned alot about certain things.
This guy is a contemptable man and being a “born again” loon and having direct conversations with god, in his own mind, and governing from that perspective, ie from the pulpit has been the main reason for his misguided and unwavering approach to his presidency. He is the perfect example of why there needs to be a separation of church and state. W has made every wrong/bad/illegal decision from listening to the the little voice in his head he calls God!
I did not vote for our incoming guy based on his lack of experience on an executive level and hope he does not govern the same. W’s legacy is already written in the pages of history and he can most certainly be judged even with just over two weeks to finish. One thing all the above did not really touch upon is the multiple mistakes made in the last 8 years. Civil war, Depression, and so on were one or two major crisis in the respective terms. W has consistently screwed up on one challenge after another. Every prez could be picked apart for poor judgement at some point in their time as our chief politician, but I feel none will be so easily or readily as this current president.
anarchy doesn’t quite work either!
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