You can't judge the effects of various policies until years after those policies have had an effect for better or for worse. We know now that affirmative action has been a failure, and it's been about 50 years. How long did it take to eventually realize that the programs designed to end the depression actually prolonged it?
No one can get a historical perspective until the acts and omissions become part of history. Right now, there is no historical perspective of Bush's presidency. There is just a continuation of the hysteria present during his presidency.
It is generally accepted that there is an average of 50 years to develop a historical perspective. Partly explained here.
Assessing Historic Integrity - Oregon Online Architectural Guide
The age of a historic resource is also an important consideration in the survey process. The National Register usually excludes resources that are less than 50 years old. The 50 year mark is a general estimate or the time needed to develop historical perspective and to evaluate significance. The 50 year mark guards against listing resources of passing contemporary interest
There is no way the effect of the Bush administration can presently be calculated from a historical perspective and it is dishonest for historians to claim that it can be. There is no historial basis to find today that Bush was a good president or a bad president.
From your own citation
http://hnn.us/articles/48941.html
All of these comments are perfectly legitimate political commentary, but they are not historical assessments. They are politics, pure and simple. (A poll which McElvaine hoped would be taken into account in the 2006 elections, and a new poll in the election year of 2008—can anyone seriously doubt this is, in large part, about politics?) Also, notice what sort of list McElvaine provided with his commentary on the 2004 poll. He listed 13 reasons why the Bush presidency should be rated as a failed presidency, and which he used to help him place this failure at the proper place in the list of failed presidencies. Where is the list of “pros” to go with this list of “cons?” Isn’t the presentation of both sides of the case the minimum that a real historical assessment requires? McElvaine was not providing an historical assessment (even a tentative one), he was making a case—which is a perfectly legitimate thing to do, but it is not historical scholarship, it is politics.
In his essay on the 2004 poll, McElvaine noted some of the objections I am making here—including the general notion that this kind of polling is premature, a notion which he simply dismisses. He also rebuffed the argument that the poll tells us more about the politics of the respondents than the subject of the poll, with this bit of reasoning: “. . . it seems clear that a similar survey taken during the presidency of Bush’s father would not have yielded results nearly as condemnatory. And, for all the distaste liberal historians had for Ronald Reagan, relatively few would have rated his administration as worse than that of Richard Nixon. Yet today 57 percent of all the historians who participated in the survey (and 70 percent of those who see the Bush presidency as a failure) . . . rate it as worse than the two presidencies in the past half century that liberals have most loved to hate, those of Nixon and Reagan.”
I am bound to say that this argument strikes me as little more than saying that it is okay to be biased against a current politician just so long as we have a relative measuring stick which we can use to show that we are relatively less biased against others. Might I also point out, that both Nixon and Reagan were no longer in office in 2004, and so our political passions have had time to cool regarding our disapproval of their politics, while our disapproval of Bush’s politics are still fresh and pressing concerns—which tends to impair our efforts at objective judgment.
Instant history. Untrue, but satisfying an impatient public.
Valid historical judgments are ensured by those very processes of historical research and scholarship that are being short-circuited here. These processes must be engaged before we have any valid justification to claim that the results are a professional assessment. We literally do not have any historical knowledge until we have engaged the procedures of archival research, publication, peer review, etc., that are the hallmarks of historical knowledge. We have lots of speculations, and guesses, and opinions, but no actual historical knowledge. At this point, what we have before us is basically the journalists’ view of the Bush presidency. But there is a reason we do not award the Bancroft Prize to Keith Olbermann. The “informed opinion” of the community of historians, in advance of actual historical research, is just a report on the political views of this community, not the findings of history.
