The 22nd of February was George Washington's birthday. C-SPAN's Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership, the results of which were just released, ranked him at number two, second only to Lincoln. According to C-SPAN, "a cross-section of 65 presidential historians ranked the 42 former occupants of the White House on ten attributes of leadership." Rounding out the top five were Franklin and then Theodore Roosevelt, and Truman.
And how did George W. Bush rank? He came in at 36th. (I'd say that was quite generous.) No doubt he will just shake this off and say he was misunderestimated, and that the history books in a century or two will be wise enough to appreciate what he accomplished during his terms in office. "History takes a long time for us to reach," he once remarked.
George Mason University, VA, conducted a History News Network Poll last March about then-President Bush, which got responses from 109 historians. "98.2 percent assessed the presidency of Mr. Bush to be a failure while 1.8 percent classified it as a success." And, "more than 61 percent of the historians concluded that the [Bush] presidency is the worst in the nation's history."
Here are some further excerpts from the April 1st HNN article written by Robert S. McElvaine about their poll:
. . .Among those who responded are several of the nation's most respected historians, including Pulitzer and Bancroft Prize winners.Mr. Bush, George Washington would surely agree, if he were alive today at age 277, that you belong at the bottom of the heap, and that posterity will revile your name.
"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."
"Bush does only two things well,” said one of the most distinguished historians. “He knows how to make the very rich very much richer, and he has an amazing talent for f**king up everything else he even approaches. His administration has been the most reckless, dangerous, irresponsible, mendacious, arrogant, self-righteous, incompetent, and deeply corrupt one in all of American history.”
. . .another remarked that Bush's "denial of any personal responsibility can only be described as silly."
