61% of Historians Rate the Bush Presidency Worst

Article here. It's quite entertaining. I suggest you read the whole thing.

“As far as history goes and all of these quotes about people trying to guess what the history of the Bush administration is going to be, you know, I take great comfort in knowing that they don’t know what they are talking about, because history takes a long time for us to reach.”— George W. Bush, Fox News Sunday, Feb 10, 2008

A Pew Research Center poll released last week found that the share of the American public that approves of President George W. Bush has dropped to a new low of 28 percent.

An unscientific poll of professional historians completed the same week produced results far worse for a president clinging to the hope that history will someday take a kinder view of his presidency than does contemporary public opinion. . . .

In an informal survey of 109 professional historians conducted over a three-week period through the History News Network, 98.2 percent assessed the presidency of Mr. Bush to be a failure while 1.8 percent classified it as a success.

Asked to rank the presidency of George W. Bush in comparison to those of the other 41 American presidents, more than 61 percent of the historians concluded that the current presidency is the worst in the nation’s history. Another 35 percent of the historians surveyed rated the Bush presidency in the 31st to 41st category, while only four of the 109 respondents ranked the current presidency as even among the top two-thirds of American administrations. . . .

There are at least two obvious criticisms of such a survey. It is in no sense a scientific sample of historians. The participants are self-selected, although participation was open to all historians. Among those who responded are several of the nation’s most respected historians, including Pulitzer and Bancroft Prize winners. . . .

“No individual president can compare to the second Bush,” wrote one. “Glib, contemptuous, ignorant, incurious, a dupe of anyone who humors his deluded belief in his heroic self, he has bankrupted the country with his disastrous war and his tax breaks for the rich, trampled on the Bill of Rights, appointed foxes in every henhouse, compounded the terrorist threat, turned a blind eye to torture and corruption and a looming ecological disaster, and squandered the rest of the world’s goodwill. In short, no other president’s faults have had so deleterious an effect on not only the country but the world at large.” . . .

A few of the comments.

“With his unprovoked and disastrous war of aggression in Iraq and his monstrous deficits, Bush has set this country on a course that will take decades to correct,” said another historian. “When future historians look back to identify the moment at which the United States began to lose its position of world leadership, they will point—rightly—to the Bush presidency. Thanks to his policies, it is now easy to see America losing out to its competitors in any number of area: China is rapidly becoming the manufacturing powerhouse of the next century, India the high tech and services leader, and Europe the region with the best quality of life.” [From Brandy Lewis]

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Too perfect! In a mere 91 words written at a 5th grade level, Brandy Lewis captured and embodied precisely all the things that best characterize what the Bush years have been about . . . . [From Dan Stewart]

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Dan Stewart, I applaud your analysis. One thing I am surprised to see is someone like Brandy Lewis hanging out on HNN. Shouldn't [...insert a name for a holy book of your choice here...] be sufficient for all queries about past, present and future for these people? There is still hope I guess if they just read something else. Maybe they can think for themselves some day. I hope. [From Evgueni Khanine]

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To blithely say you can't "accurately judge the leadership of anyone based on [the] present" seems a bit of a stretch. I certainly understand that the passage of time allows for the unfolding of events and contextual perspective, but that's mere marginal nuance relative to the larger events of the day.

It’s like saying Hitler’s (you did say “anyone”) leadership could only have been judged in the light of historical perspective. But, how much has the consensus opinion of Hitler’s leadership changed from 1945 to today – only marginally, if that. So, contrary to your ridiculous assertion, if a president is directly responsible for causing objectively horrific events during his term, no passage of time will magically change that fact. [Also from Dan Stewart]