Despite attempts by some die hards to salvage his faded glory, George Bush’s reputation, at least among historians, is not good. According to a poll of presidential historians, George W. Bush is the fifth worst president ever. I would like to demur. George is being deprived of his due, in my humble opinion. There’s no way that there were four presidents worse than him. The historians have missed the mark.
Perhaps it’s the criteria employed, such as intelligence (George rises to second worst on that score), some of which are not only subjective (e.g., communication ability), given that we don’t, for instance, have IQ scores available, but fail to take the times into account. In fact, some, like “communication ability” have almost no relevance to the early presidents.
I would suggest that the most important criteria, also perhaps subjective, for judging the worst should be this: which president did the most harm.
Now, this criteria does disadvantage modern presidents, but I think that’s fair. Sure Pierce and Buchanan were horrible presidents, bit they governed at a time of strong Congresses, weak presidents, and a fairly limited range available for presidential harm. Sure, they stood by and let things come to a head, civil war wise, but the sad fact is that the war was going to come, whatever they did and had they tried to do anything we would today consider laudable, they would merely have hastened the war. They caused no harm, though they may have hastened it or been blind to its inevitable coming.
Bush, on the other hand, was perhaps the most powerful president in history. He got virtually every piece of legislation he wanted, except the destruction of social security. He arrogated gobs of power to himself, with virtually no legislative pushback. No one stood in his way. He bestrode the world like a Colossus, and then shit on it He wreaked destruction on constitutional norms, norms of international law, the national and world economies, and the country of Iraq, and that’s just naming the big stuff. When you delve into the small stuff (relatively speaking)-stacking the bureaucracy with corporate flunkies, politicizing the Justice Department, etc, you find that he wreaked destruction wherever he trod. Given the world wide scope and the all pervasiveness of the harm he caused, and the enormity of that harm, one must conclude that he is at least the second worst president ever.
The only reasonable contender to grab the laurels from him is Andrew Johnson. Johnson was a staunch Union man from a Southern state. That’s why he was chosen as vice president in 1864, perhaps the worst decision Lincoln ever made, because Johnson was also a thoroughgoing racist. It is possible, just possible, that had he not attempted to obstruct Reconstruction at every turn, the history of the races in this country might have been different. But I doubt it. There were powerful forces at work that would, inevitably, have handed the South back to the racists. At worst, Johnson merely hastened that day.
Bush did it all by himself. He was not the catspaw of historical forces. He was not swept along by events. He blithely took the lead, and let the country and the world to perdition. So in my book, while Andy Johnson certainly merits consideration, Bush takes the palm. Worst ever.
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