The Baghdad journalist who sent George Bush a “goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people” by flinging shoes at his head probably spoke for many people in the Arab world, where the American leader is widely disliked. The extraordinary incident gave added point to a broader question increasingly asked as he nears the end of his eight-year term in office: Was George Bush the worst ever US president?
Any objective answer depends to a considerable degree on how “worst ever” is defined. A Quinnipac university study in 2006 asked voters: “Which of these 11 presidents since 1945 would you consider the worst president — Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr., Bill Clinton and George W Bush?” Bush the younger won hands down, with 34 percent picking him as the worst, followed by Nixon (17 percent) and Clinton (16 percent). And these findings are more favorable to Bush than more recent surveys. Seventy-six percent of respondents told CNN last month that they viewed Bush unfavorably — the highest negative rating since polls began 60 years ago. But these surveys also reveal some tough, albeit obscure, competition for the title of worst ever.
The little-remembered Franklin Pierce, president from 1853 to 1857, is castigated for expanding slavery in the west and thus bringing the civil war closer. Another antebellum president, James Buchanan, is also taken to task for failing to avert the south’s secession. Warren Harding’s White House tenure from 1921 to 1923 was marked by notorious scandals and resignations. Under him, it is claimed, the US regressed into a period of isolationism, nativism, and recession, ending with the Wall Street crash. Even more useless than Bush, in an existential sense, were William Henry Harrison and James Garfield, both of whom died after less than six months in office.
And then there are specific measures. If the foremost duty of a president, as US commander-in-chief, is to protect the American people from murderous attack by foreign enemies, then Bush clearly failed momentously on Sept. 11, 2001. He failed to see Al-Qaeda coming and failed lamentably to stop them. Yet much the same could be said of the otherwise admired Roosevelt, who was caught napping by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor in 1941. Some maintain the president’s main job is to ensure and enhance the nation’s economic wellbeing and overall prosperity. The ongoing, made-in-America credit crunch and the global slump that has followed point to Bush as the all-time biggest bungler. But that would be to ignore the disastrous contribution of Herbert Hoover, president from 1929 to 1933, and a principal author, by some accounts, of the great depression. Like Bush, Hoover is said to have become depressed. Walking into a room with him in it was said by one contemporary to be like falling into a bottle of black ink.
Bush has failed to win or even finish the wars he started, in Afghanistan, Iraq and the wider “war on terror”. But that was true of Johnson and Kennedy. And unlike Iraq, their Vietnam misadventure nearly tore America apart. Even the sainted Abe Lincoln presided over and ruthlessly prosecuted a civil war that killed more Americans (up to 700,000) than any single war before or since.
All told, it can probably be generally agreed, except by the stubborn rump of conservative Republicans who think him wonderful, that Bush has been a pretty poor president, and possibly the worst in living memory.
