The History News Network did an informal survey of 109 presidential historians and found that so far, history is not treating George W. Bush kindly. 98% view Bush’s presidency as a failure:
61% of the historians rated Bush as the worst president ever and an additional 35% rated him in the bottom 10.
The reason for the hesitancy some historians had in categorizing the Bush presidency as the worst ever, which led them to place it instead in the “nearly the worst” group, was well expressed by another historian who said, “It is a bit too early to judge whether Bush’s presidency is the worst ever, though it certainly has a shot to take the title. Without a doubt, it is among the worst.”
In a similar survey of historians I conducted for HNN four years ago, Mr. Bush had fared somewhat better, with 19 percent rating his presidency a success and 81 percent classifying it as a failure. More striking is the dramatic increase in the percentage of historians who rate the Bush presidency the worst ever. In 2004, only 11.6 percent of the respondents rated Bush’s presidency last. That conclusion is now reached by nearly six times as large a fraction of historians.
Go read the comments of some of the historians, but this one is my favorite:
One historian indicated that his reason for rating Bush as worst is that the current president combines traits of some of his failed predecessors: “the paranoia of Nixon, the ethics of Harding and the good sense of Herbert Hoover. . . . . God willing, this will go down as the nadir of American politics.” Another classified Bush as “an ideologue who got the nation into a totally unnecessary war, and has broken the Constitution more often than even Nixon. He is not a conservative, nor a Christian, just an immoral man . . . .” Still another remarked that Bush’s “denial of any personal responsibility can only be described as silly.”
He’s Nixon, Hoover and Harding without the good parts. There’s only two things I’d rate Bush as good at: shouting into a megaphone and leaving office. As one of the historians stated, people will look back to Bush as the beginning of the decline for America and Bush’s mess will take decades to fix.