This is interesting
This is interesting — Texas Monthly asked 15 people (historians, political analysts, and the like) to given an assessment of George Bush’s presidency. There’s a few shills (Mark McKinnon) and right-wing nut jobs (Niall Ferguson) in there, but all in all, it’s worth a read. I realize this isn’t local, but I can’t stop my obsession with how history will view George Bush (I am confident he will be remembered as one of the worst 5 or 6 presidents). I think the most interesting is probably Robert Caro’s piece, but I liked the ending of Bruce Bartlett’s (a conservative economist who worked under Reagan) a lot too:
He doesn’t listen to anybody. If there were anybody on earth he would listen to, it would be his father, and he clearly has not paid the slightest bit of attention to his father’s advice or to James Baker’s, Brent Scowcroft’s, or Colin Powell’s. You can’t reason with him. You can’t do anything except wait for the clock to run out.
Related posts:
- What would Ronald Reagan think about the Health Care debate? Ron Reagan JR provides a clue
- Interesting post at the new Channel 13 blog
- Really interesting piece on polling
- Kuhl In Jerusalem–it’s a sin to tell a lie (ed. note: there appears to be no lie here, but the explanation is interesting)
- Interesting piece on WHAM Channel 13 coming up soon
Great link. I also dug the Michael Lind piece.
For the record, I’m with Nicholas Von Hoffman: Bush’s only competition in the ‘worst president’ stakes is Buchanan.
Ummm… it is actually not true that he does not listen to anybody, it is just that he only listens to one voice other than his own: God’s. He has pretty much told us that. Which is why I think history will see him as making a run at the return of the divine ruler school of governance (executive power to imprison at will, “I don’t need to ask no FISA court to wiretap,” divine certainty about WMDs in the face of the facts, “I’m the decider,” etc.)
Unfortunately, some Americans seem just as ready as North Koreans to embrace a Dear Leader and his divine right…. scary part is, those people will still be here after W goes back to managing losing baseball teams under the patronage of Daddy’s friends and the direction of the Almighty.
I’m thinking Andrew Jackson is right up there for worst president. The Trail of Tears was a Native American Holocaust and people seem to forget that it ever happened. That SOB could be a progenitor of Adolph’s or George’s.
Caro’s long experience and his, fearless, methodical approach to presidential biography make his comments credible. Most of the other writing seems to be self-serving by comparison. Lind’s description of the rationale for the war is refreshing, in that it recognizes the fact that permanent military bases are the real — and, it seems, successfully achieved — objective of the Iraq war. Rather than South Korea, I think that the Phillipines would be an better analogy though, in that the bases are likely to prove indigestible to a mature state of Iraq in the long term.
Andrew Jackson is controversial by 21st century standards, but you can’t call him the worst president based on just one action. To his credit, he founded the modern Democratic party and he peacefully defused the first secession crisis.He’s also important because he was the first “populist” and “western” president and the first president who wasn’t a member of the Constitutional Convention or the son of a member.
If you want a real early 19th century villian, James Polk is worse - he ginned up a war with Mexico in order to seize territory in the Southwest, partially with an eye towards expanding slavery westward into Texas. (Mexico outlawed slavery long before the U.S. did, which was one of the points of contention between the Mexican authorities and the Americans who moved to Texas territory.)
There are two possibly successful Bush legacies that nobody has mentioned; the massive expansion of the importance and power of the Vice President and the neverending campaign.
While Cheney’s attempt to create an autonomous 4th branch of government accountable to noone is constitutionally suspect, the idea of having a strong, active Vice President and splitting the workload of the executive between them is sound.
The permanent campaign, where every action the President, the VP or the executive staff is planned for maximum political effect is also a highly successful feature of this presidency. Everything from those Orwellian slogans that appear on the scrim behind the president’s podium during a speech to the late Friday departures of disgraced White House Staff is tactically perfect. While I hope that subsequent presidents don’t follow in Karl Rove’s footsteps, they would be foolish not to do so.
I don’t think that the U.S. military bases in Iraq are sustainable. Perhaps the bases in Kurdistan will survive, but the bases in central and southern Iraq are untenable. You can’t sustain a major military base in the middle of a hostile population.