Thomas Fleming: Was George W. Bush the Worst President?
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There have been several polls of historians who have voted George W. Bush the worst president in American History. This baffles me. Ive been writing and reading about presidents for a long time. What I know, and what I presume these gentleman know, doesnt connect.
Is Bush worse than John Adams? When a shooting war at sea finally started between the United States and Revolutionary France in 1798, after five or six years of reciprocal snarls, what did Honest John do? He wrote a letter to George Washington, offering to resign, so George could resume the job. How is that for presidential leadership? * * * *
Is Bush worse than Adamss successor, Thomas Jefferson, in his second term? Rather than build a decent navy to reply to the British habit of boarding American ships on the high seas and kidnapping sailors into semi-slavery in their men of war, Jefferson declared an embargo on all trade with them and their chief enemy, France. The American economy came to a horrific standstill. Smuggling became New Englands chief industry. Someone described the embargo as cutting a mans throat to cure a nosebleed. Nonplused, President Jefferson quit, without telling anyone but James Madison, his secretary of state, who was de facto acting president for the last year of Toms term.
James Madison made presidential passivity into an art form. He did nothing while Congress refused to renew the charter for the Bank of the United States in 1811, even though we were on the brink of war with the British. The next year, when the War of 1812, began, the country was soon so bankrupt, the government could not even pay the salaries of the clerks in Washington DC. Thanks to a rare ability to select the worst generals in sight, Little Jemmy, as they called him in New England, watched while 4,500 British troops landed from their ships, marched to Washington DC and burned the White House and almost everything else worth torching. You cant do much worse as a war leader than that performance.
Worse than Woodrow Wilson, who unilaterally invaded Mexico in his first term, simply because he did not approve of the man who was president When World War I exploded, his pro-British sympathies made him a sitting duck for British propaganda, When the Irish-Americans objected violently to his London tilt, Wilson said that ethnics like these loudmouthed micks were pouring poison into the veins of our national life. Meanwhile as a southern born pol to his shoelaces, he segregated almost all employees of the federal government. Finally, he talked Congress into declaring war on Germany on the assumption that we would not have to send a single soldier to France. Before the war ended, we had 2,000,000 troops in Europe and in three months of fighting, lost a staggering 144,000 men. Wilson then persuaded the Germans to negotiate a treaty based on his idealistic 14 points, which might have achieved a lasting peace , if he had insisted on them. Instead, he signed on with the British and French revenge-seekers and forced the Germans to sign the most vindictive imaginable peace treaty, which virtually guaranteed World War II.
Then theres Warren G. Harding, whose dimwittedness was legendary in his own time. Elected by 7 million votes thanks to the electorates loathing for Wilson, Warren confessed to an amazing number of reporters that he was not up to the job. * * * *
Worse than Franklin D. Roosevelt in his second term? Elected by a massive majority, he decided he could get away with packing the Supreme Court with an indeterminate number of Democrats. Congress wasted a year wrangling over the bill and ultimately rejected it. Few presidents have been so humiliatingly repudiated by a majority of their own party. * * * *
Worse than Jimmy Carter, who presided over the most horrendous stagflation in our history, without a clue about what to do about it? He frequently denounced Congress, where his own party had a solid majority * * * *
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I write all this not to denigrate these men. All of them deserve measureable admiration for achievements in their presidencies or after them. * * * *
In this light, however wavering, maybe it is time to suspend the rush to judgment on George Bush for ten or twenty years. * * * *
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