The Worst President in History?
One of America's leading historians assesses George W. Bush
SEAN WILENTZ
Posted Apr 21, 2006 12:34 PM
George W. Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical
disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist
attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally
around the White House once again, there seems to be little the
administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of
U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many
historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be
remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.
From time to time, after hours, I kick back with my colleagues
at Princeton to argue idly about which president really was the
worst of them all. For years, these perennial debates have largely
focused on the same handful of chief executives whom national polls
of historians, from across the ideological and political spectrum,
routinely cite as the bottom of the presidential barrel. Was the
lousiest James Buchanan, who, confronted with Southern secession in
1860, dithered to a degree that, as his most recent biographer has
said, probably amounted to disloyalty -- and who handed to his
successor, Abraham Lincoln, a nation already torn asunder? Was it
Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, who actively sided with former
Confederates and undermined Reconstruction? What about the amiably
incompetent Warren G. Harding, whose administration was fabulously
corrupt? Or, though he has his defenders, Herbert Hoover, who tried
some reforms but remained imprisoned in his own outmoded
individualist ethic and collapsed under the weight of the
stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression's onset? The younger
historians always put in a word for Richard M. Nixon, the only
American president forced to resign from office.
Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the
title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415
historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found
that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a
"failure." Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the
president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public
support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called
the administration's "pursuit of disastrous policies." In fact,
roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being
facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton
-- a category in which Bush is the only contestant.
The lopsided decision of historians should give everyone pause.
Contrary to popular stereotypes, historians are generally a
cautious bunch. We assess the past from widely divergent points of
view and are deeply concerned about being viewed as fair and
accurate by our colleagues. When we make historical judgments, we
are acting not as voters or even pundits, but as scholars who must
evaluate all the evidence, good, bad or indifferent. Separate
surveys, conducted by those perceived as conservatives as well as
liberals, show remarkable unanimity about who the best and worst
presidents have been.
Historians do tend, as a group, to be far more liberal than the
citizenry as a whole -- a fact the president's admirers have seized
on to dismiss the poll results as transparently biased. One
pro-Bush historian said the survey revealed more about "the current
crop of history professors" than about Bush or about Bush's
eventual standing. But if historians were simply motivated by a
strong collective liberal bias, they might be expected to call Bush
the worst president since his father, or Ronald Reagan, or Nixon.
Instead, more than half of those polled -- and nearly three-fourths
of those who gave Bush a negative rating -- reached back
before Nixon to find a president they considered as
miserable as Bush. The presidents most commonly linked with Bush
included Hoover, Andrew Johnson and Buchanan. Twelve percent of the
historians polled -- nearly as many as those who rated Bush a
success -- flatly called Bush the worst president in American
history. And these figures were gathered before the debacles over
Hurricane Katrina, Bush's role in the Valerie Plame leak affair and
the deterioration of the situation in Iraq. Were the historians
polled today, that figure would certainly be higher.
Even worse for the president, the general public, having once
given Bush the highest approval ratings ever recorded, now appears
to be coming around to the dismal view held by most historians. To
be sure, the president retains a considerable base of supporters
who believe in and adore him, and who reject all criticism with a
mixture of disbelief and fierce contempt -- about one-third of the
electorate. (When the columnist Richard Reeves publicized the
historians' poll last year and suggested it might have merit, he
drew thousands of abusive replies that called him an idiot and that
praised Bush as, in one writer's words, "a Christian who actually
acts on his deeply held beliefs.") Yet the ranks of the true
believers have thinned dramatically. A majority of voters in
forty-three states now disapprove of Bush's handling of his job.
Since the commencement of reliable polling in the 1940s, only one
twice-elected president has seen his ratings fall as low as Bush's
in his second term: Richard Nixon, during the months preceding his
resignation in 1974. No two-term president since polling began has
fallen from such a height of popularity as Bush's (in the
neighborhood of ninety percent, during the patriotic upswell
following the 2001 attacks) to such a low (now in the midthirties).
No president, including Harry Truman (whose ratings sometimes
dipped below Nixonian levels), has experienced such a virtually
unrelieved decline as Bush has since his high point. Apart from
sharp but temporary upticks that followed the commencement of the
Iraq war and the capture of Saddam Hussein, and a recovery during
the weeks just before and after his re-election, the Bush trend has
been a profile in fairly steady disillusionment.
* * * *
How does any president's reputation sink so low? The reasons are
best understood as the reverse of those that produce presidential
greatness. In almost every survey of historians dating back to the
1940s, three presidents have emerged as supreme successes: George
Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These were
the men who guided the nation through what historians consider its
greatest crises: the founding era after the ratification of the
Constitution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second
World War. Presented with arduous, at times seemingly impossible
circumstances, they rallied the nation, governed brilliantly and
left the republic more secure than when they entered office.
Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties --
Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush -- have divided the
nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each
case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous
domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks,
executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush,
however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not
only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also
displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential
failures -- an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that
abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any
pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has
undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of
presidential performance.
* * * *
THE CREDIBILITY GAP
No previous president appears to have squandered the public's
trust more than Bush has. In the 1840s, President James Polk gained
a reputation for deviousness over his alleged manufacturing of the
war with Mexico and his supposedly covert pro-slavery views.
Abraham Lincoln, then an Illinois congressman, virtually labeled
Polk a liar when he called him, from the floor of the House, "a
bewildered, confounded and miserably perplexed man" and denounced
the war as "from beginning to end, the sheerest deception." But the
swift American victory in the war, Polk's decision to stick by his
pledge to serve only one term and his sudden death shortly after
leaving office spared him the ignominy over slavery that befell his
successors in the 1850s. With more than two years to go in Bush's
second term and no swift victory in sight, Bush's reputation will
probably have no such reprieve.
The problems besetting Bush are of a more modern kind than
Polk's, suited to the television age -- a crisis both in confidence
and credibility. In 1965, Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam travails gave
birth to the phrase "credibility gap," meaning the distance between
a president's professions and the public's perceptions of reality.
It took more than two years for Johnson's disapproval rating in the
Gallup Poll to reach fifty-two percent in March 1968 -- a figure
Bush long ago surpassed, but that was sufficient to persuade the
proud LBJ not to seek re-election. Yet recently, just short of
three years after Bush buoyantly declared "mission accomplished" in
Iraq, his disapproval ratings have been running considerably higher
than Johnson's, at about sixty percent. More than half the country
now considers Bush dishonest and untrustworthy, and a decisive
plurality consider him less trustworthy than his predecessor, Bill
Clinton -- a figure still attacked by conservative zealots as
"Slick Willie."
Previous modern presidents, including Truman, Reagan and
Clinton, managed to reverse plummeting ratings and regain the
public's trust by shifting attention away from political and policy
setbacks, and by overhauling the White House's inner circles. But
Bush's publicly expressed view that he has made no major mistakes,
coupled with what even the conservative commentator William F.
Buckley Jr. calls his "high-flown pronouncements" about failed
policies, seems to foreclose the first option. Upping the ante in
the Middle East and bombing Iranian nuclear sites, a strategy
reportedly favored by some in the White House, could distract the
public and gain Bush immediate political capital in advance of the
2006 midterm elections -- but in the long term might severely
worsen the already dire situation in Iraq, especially among Shiite
Muslims linked to the Iranians. And given Bush's ardent attachment
to loyal aides, no matter how discredited, a major personnel
shake-up is improbable, short of indictments. Replacing Andrew Card
with Joshua Bolten as chief of staff -- a move announced by the
president in March in a tone that sounded more like defiance than
contrition -- represents a rededication to current policies and
personnel, not a serious change. (Card, an old Bush family
retainer, was widely considered more moderate than most of the men
around the president and had little involvement in policy-making.)
The power of Vice President Dick Cheney, meanwhile, remains
uncurbed. Were Cheney to announce he is stepping down due to health
problems, normally a polite pretext for a political removal, one
can be reasonably certain it would be because Cheney actually did
have grave health problems.
* * * *
BUSH AT WAR
Until the twentieth century, American presidents managed foreign
wars well -- including those presidents who prosecuted unpopular
wars. James Madison had no support from Federalist New England at
the outset of the War of 1812, and the discontent grew amid
mounting military setbacks in 1813. But Federalist political
overreaching, combined with a reversal of America's military
fortunes and the negotiation of a peace with Britain, made Madison
something of a hero again and ushered in a brief so-called Era of
Good Feelings in which his Jeffersonian Republican Party coalition
ruled virtually unopposed. The Mexican War under Polk was even more
unpopular, but its quick and victorious conclusion redounded to
Polk's favor -- much as the rapid American victory in the
Spanish-American War helped William McKinley overcome
anti-imperialist dissent.
The twentieth century was crueler to wartime presidents. After
winning re-election in 1916 with the slogan "He Kept Us Out of
War," Woodrow Wilson oversaw American entry into the First World
War. Yet while the doughboys returned home triumphant, Wilson's
idealistic and politically disastrous campaign for American entry
into the League of Nations presaged a resurgence of the opposition
Republican Party along with a redoubling of American isolationism
that lasted until Pearl Harbor.
Bush has more in common with post-1945 Democratic presidents
Truman and Johnson, who both became bogged down in overseas
military conflicts with no end, let alone victory, in sight. But
Bush has become bogged down in a singularly crippling way. On
September 10th, 2001, he held among the lowest ratings of any
modern president for that point in a first term. (Only Gerald Ford,
his popularity reeling after his pardon of Nixon, had comparable
numbers.) The attacks the following day transformed Bush's
presidency, giving him an extraordinary opportunity to achieve
greatness. Some of the early signs were encouraging. Bush's simple,
unflinching eloquence and his quick toppling of the Taliban
government in Afghanistan rallied the nation. Yet even then, Bush
wasted his chance by quickly choosing partisanship over
leadership.
No other president -- Lincoln in the Civil War, FDR in World War
II, John F. Kennedy at critical moments of the Cold War -- faced
with such a monumental set of military and political circumstances
failed to embrace the opposing political party to help wage a truly
national struggle. But Bush shut out and even demonized the
Democrats. Top military advisers and even members of the
president's own Cabinet who expressed any reservations or
criticisms of his policies -- including retired Marine Corps Gen.
Anthony Zinni and former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill --
suffered either dismissal, smear attacks from the president's
supporters or investigations into their alleged breaches of
national security. The wise men who counseled Bush's father,
including James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, found their entreaties
brusquely ignored by his son. When asked if he ever sought advice
from the elder Bush, the president responded, "There is a higher
Father that I appeal to."
All the while, Bush and the most powerful figures in the
administration, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld, were planting the seeds for the crises to come by
diverting the struggle against Al Qaeda toward an all-out effort to
topple their pre-existing target, Saddam Hussein. In a deliberate
political decision, the administration stampeded the Congress and a
traumatized citizenry into the Iraq invasion on the basis of what
has now been demonstrated to be tendentious and perhaps fabricated
evidence of an imminent Iraqi threat to American security, one that
the White House suggested included nuclear weapons. Instead of
emphasizing any political, diplomatic or humanitarian aspects of a
war on Iraq -- an appeal that would have sounded too "sensitive,"
as Cheney once sneered -- the administration built a "Bush
Doctrine" of unprovoked, preventive warfare, based on speculative
threats and embracing principles previously abjured by every
previous generation of U.S. foreign policy-makers, even at the
height of the Cold War. The president did so with premises founded,
in the case of Iraq, on wishful thinking. He did so while
proclaiming an expansive Wilsonian rhetoric of making the world
safe for democracy -- yet discarding the multilateralism and
systems of international law (including the Geneva Conventions)
that emanated from Wilson's idealism. He did so while dismissing
intelligence that an American invasion could spark a long and
bloody civil war among Iraq's fierce religious and ethnic rivals,
reports that have since proved true. And he did so after repeated
warnings by military officials such as Gen. Eric Shinseki that
pacifying postwar Iraq would require hundreds of thousands of
American troops -- accurate estimates that Paul Wolfowitz and other
Bush policy gurus ridiculed as "wildly off the mark."
When William F. Buckley, the man whom many credit as the founder
of the modern conservative movement, writes categorically, as he
did in February, that "one can't doubt that the American objective
in Iraq has failed," then something terrible has happened. Even as
a brash young iconoclast, Buckley always took the long view. The
Bush White House seems incapable of doing so, except insofar as a
tiny trusted circle around the president constantly reassures him
that he is a messianic liberator and profound freedom fighter, on a
par with FDR and Lincoln, and that history will vindicate his every
act and utterance.
* * * *
BUSH AT HOME
Bush came to office in 2001 pledging to govern as a
"compassionate conservative," more moderate on domestic policy than
the dominant right wing of his party. The pledge proved hollow, as
Bush tacked immediately to the hard right. Previous presidents and
their parties have suffered when their actions have belied their
campaign promises. Lyndon Johnson is the most conspicuous recent
example, having declared in his 1964 run against the hawkish
Republican Barry Goldwater that "we are not about to send American
boys nine or ten thousand miles away from home to do what Asian
boys ought to be doing for themselves." But no president has
surpassed Bush in departing so thoroughly from his original
campaign persona.
The heart of Bush's domestic policy has turned out to be nothing
more than a series of massively regressive tax cuts -- a return,
with a vengeance, to the discredited Reagan-era supply-side faith
that Bush's father once ridiculed as "voodoo economics." Bush
crowed in triumph in February 2004, "We cut taxes, which basically
meant people had more money in their pocket." The claim is bogus
for the majority of Americans, as are claims that tax cuts have led
to impressive new private investment and job growth. While wiping
out the solid Clinton-era federal surplus and raising federal
deficits to staggering record levels, Bush's tax policies have
necessitated hikes in federal fees, state and local taxes, and
co-payment charges to needy veterans and families who rely on
Medicaid, along with cuts in loan programs to small businesses and
college students, and in a wide range of state services. The lion's
share of benefits from the tax cuts has gone to the very richest
Americans, while new business investment has increased at a
historically sluggish rate since the peak of the last business
cycle five years ago. Private-sector job growth since 2001 has been
anemic compared to the Bush administration's original forecasts and
is chiefly attributable not to the tax cuts but to increased
federal spending, especially on defense. Real wages for
middle-income Americans have been dropping since the end of 2003:
Last year, on average, nominal wages grew by only 2.4 percent, a
meager gain that was completely erased by an average inflation rate
of 3.4 percent.
The monster deficits, caused by increased federal spending
combined with the reduction of revenue resulting from the tax cuts,
have also placed Bush's administration in a historic class of its
own with respect to government borrowing. According to the Treasury
Department, the forty-two presidents who held office between 1789
and 2000 borrowed a combined total of $1.01 trillion from foreign
governments and financial institutions. But between 2001 and 2005
alone, the Bush White House borrowed $1.05 trillion, more than all
of the previous presidencies combined. Having inherited
the largest federal surplus in American history in 2001, he has
turned it into the largest deficit ever -- with an even higher
deficit, $423 billion, forecast for fiscal year 2006. Yet Bush --
sounding much like Herbert Hoover in 1930 predicting that
"prosperity is just around the corner" -- insists that he will cut
federal deficits in half by 2009, and that the best way to
guarantee this would be to make permanent his tax cuts, which
helped cause the deficit in the first place!
The rest of what remains of Bush's skimpy domestic agenda is
either failed or failing -- a record unmatched since the presidency
of Herbert Hoover. The No Child Left Behind educational-reform act
has proved so unwieldy, draconian and poorly funded that several
states -- including Utah, one of Bush's last remaining political
strongholds -- have fought to opt out of it entirely. White House
proposals for immigration reform and a guest-worker program have
succeeded mainly in dividing pro-business Republicans (who want
more low-wage immigrant workers) from paleo-conservatives fearful
that hordes of Spanish-speaking newcomers will destroy American
culture. The paleos' call for tougher anti-immigrant laws -- a
return to the punitive spirit of exclusion that led to the
notorious Immigration Act of 1924 that shut the door to immigrants
from Southern and Eastern Europe -- has in turn deeply alienated
Hispanic voters from the Republican Party, badly undermining the
GOP's hopes of using them to build a permanent national electoral
majority. The recent pro-immigrant demonstrations, which drew
millions of marchers nationwide, indicate how costly the Republican
divide may prove.
The one noncorporate constituency to which Bush has consistently
deferred is the Christian right, both in his selections for the
federal bench and in his implications that he bases his policies on
premillennialist, prophetic Christian doctrine. Previous presidents
have regularly invoked the Almighty. McKinley is supposed to have
fallen to his knees, seeking divine guidance about whether to take
control of the Philippines in 1898, although the story may be
apocryphal. But no president before Bush has allowed the press to
disclose, through a close friend, his startling belief that he was
ordained by God to lead the country. The White House's sectarian
positions -- over stem-cell research, the teaching of
pseudoscientific "intelligent design," global population control,
the Terri Schiavo spectacle and more -- have led some to conclude
that Bush has promoted the transformation of the GOP into what
former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips calls "the first
religious party in U.S. history."
Bush's faith-based conception of his mission, which stands above
and beyond reasoned inquiry, jibes well with his administration's
pro-business dogma on global warming and other urgent environmental
issues. While forcing federally funded agencies to remove from
their Web sites scientific information about reproductive health
and the effectiveness of condoms in combating HIV/AIDS, and while
peremptorily overruling staff scientists at the Food and Drug
Administration on making emergency contraception available over the
counter, Bush officials have censored and suppressed research
findings they don't like by the Environmental Protection Agency,
the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Agriculture.
Far from being the conservative he said he was, Bush has blazed a
radical new path as the first American president in history who is
outwardly hostile to science -- dedicated, as a distinguished,
bipartisan panel of educators and scientists (including forty-nine
Nobel laureates) has declared, to "the distortion of scientific
knowledge for partisan political ends."
The Bush White House's indifference to domestic problems and
science alike culminated in the catastrophic responses to Hurricane
Katrina. Scientists had long warned that global warming was
intensifying hurricanes, but Bush ignored them -- much as he and
his administration sloughed off warnings from the director of the
National Hurricane Center before Katrina hit. Reorganized under the
Department of Homeland Security, the once efficient Federal
Emergency Management Agency turned out, under Bush, to have become
a nest of cronyism and incompetence. During the months immediately
after the storm, Bush traveled to New Orleans eight times to
promise massive rebuilding aid from the federal government. On
March 30th, however, Bush's Gulf Coast recovery coordinator
admitted that it could take as long as twenty-five years for the
city to recover.
Karl Rove has sometimes likened Bush to the imposing,
no-nonsense President Andrew Jackson. Yet Jackson took measures to
prevent those he called "the rich and powerful" from bending "the
acts of government to their selfish purposes." Jackson also gained
eternal renown by saving New Orleans from British invasion against
terrible odds. Generations of Americans sang of Jackson's famous
victory. In 1959, Johnny Horton's version of "The Battle of New
Orleans" won the Grammy for best country & western performance.
If anyone sings about George W. Bush and New Orleans, it will be a
blues number.
* * * *
PRESIDENTIAL MISCONDUCT
Virtually every presidential administration dating back to
George Washington's has faced charges of misconduct and threats of
impeachment against the president or his civil officers. The
alleged offenses have usually involved matters of personal
misbehavior and corruption, notably the payoff scandals that
plagued Cabinet officials who served presidents Harding and Ulysses
S. Grant. But the charges have also included alleged usurpation of
power by the president and serious criminal conduct that threatens
constitutional government and the rule of law -- most notoriously,
the charges that led to the impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill
Clinton, and to Richard Nixon's resignation.
Historians remain divided over the actual grievousness of many
of these allegations and crimes. Scholars reasonably describe the
graft and corruption around the Grant administration, for example,
as gargantuan, including a kickback scandal that led to the
resignation of Grant's secretary of war under the shadow of
impeachment. Yet the scandals produced no indictments of Cabinet
secretaries and only one of a White House aide, who was acquitted.
By contrast, the most scandal-ridden administration in the modern
era, apart from Nixon's, was Ronald Reagan's, now widely remembered
through a haze of nostalgia as a paragon of virtue. A total of
twenty-nine Reagan officials, including White House national
security adviser Robert McFarlane and deputy chief of staff Michael
Deaver, were convicted on charges stemming from the Iran-Contra
affair, illegal lobbying and a looting scandal inside the
Department of Housing and Urban Development. Three Cabinet officers
-- HUD Secretary Samuel Pierce, Attorney General Edwin Meese and
Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger -- left their posts under
clouds of scandal. In contrast, not a single official in the
Clinton administration was even indicted over his or her White
House duties, despite repeated high-profile investigations and a
successful, highly partisan impeachment drive.
The full report, of course, has yet to come on the Bush
administration. Because Bush, unlike Reagan or Clinton, enjoys a
fiercely partisan and loyal majority in Congress, his
administration has been spared scrutiny. Yet that mighty advantage
has not prevented the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's
chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on charges stemming from
an alleged major security breach in the Valerie Plame matter. (The
last White House official of comparable standing to be indicted
while still in office was Grant's personal secretary, in 1875.) It
has not headed off the unprecedented scandal involving Larry
Franklin, a high-ranking Defense Department official, who has
pleaded guilty to divulging classified information to a foreign
power while working at the Pentagon -- a crime against national
security. It has not forestalled the arrest and indictment of
Bush's top federal procurement official, David Safavian, and the
continuing investigations into Safavian's intrigues with the
disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, recently sentenced to
nearly six years in prison -- investigations in which some
prominent Republicans, including former Christian Coalition
executive director Ralph Reed (and current GOP aspirant for
lieutenant governor of Georgia) have already been implicated, and
could well produce the largest congressional corruption scandal in
American history. It has not dispelled the cloud of possible
indictment that hangs over others of Bush's closest advisers.
History may ultimately hold Bush in the greatest contempt for
expanding the powers of the presidency beyond the limits laid down
by the U.S. Constitution. There has always been a tension over the
constitutional roles of the three branches of the federal
government. The Framers intended as much, as part of the system of
checks and balances they expected would minimize tyranny. When
Andrew Jackson took drastic measures against the nation's banking
system, the Whig Senate censured him for conduct "dangerous to the
liberties of the people." During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln's
emergency decisions to suspend habeas corpus while Congress was out
of session in 1861 and 1862 has led some Americans, to this day, to
regard him as a despot. Richard Nixon's conduct of the war in
Southeast Asia and his covert domestic-surveillance programs
prompted Congress to pass new statutes regulating executive
power.
By contrast, the Bush administration -- in seeking to restore
what Cheney, a Nixon administration veteran, has called "the
legitimate authority of the presidency" -- threatens to overturn
the Framers' healthy tension in favor of presidential absolutism.
Armed with legal findings by his attorney general (and personal
lawyer) Alberto Gonzales, the Bush White House has declared that
the president's powers as commander in chief in wartime are
limitless. No previous wartime president has come close to making
so grandiose a claim. More specifically, this administration has
asserted that the president is perfectly free to violate federal
laws on such matters as domestic surveillance and the torture of
detainees. When Congress has passed legislation to limit those
assertions, Bush has resorted to issuing constitutionally dubious
"signing statements," which declare, by fiat, how he will interpret
and execute the law in question, even when that interpretation
flagrantly violates the will of Congress. Earlier presidents,
including Jackson, raised hackles by offering their own view of the
Constitution in order to justify vetoing congressional acts. Bush
doesn't bother with that: He signs the legislation (eliminating any
risk that Congress will overturn a veto), and then governs how he
pleases -- using the signing statements as if they were line-item
vetoes. In those instances when Bush's violations of federal law
have come to light, as over domestic surveillance, the White House
has devised a novel solution: Stonewall any investigation into the
violations and bid a compliant Congress simply to rewrite the
laws.
Bush's alarmingly aberrant take on the Constitution is ironic.
One need go back in the record less than a decade to find prominent
Republicans railing against far more minor presidential legal
infractions as precursors to all-out totalitarianism. "I will have
no part in the creation of a constitutional double-standard to
benefit the president," Sen. Bill Frist declared of Bill Clinton's
efforts to conceal an illicit sexual liaison. "No man is above the
law, and no man is below the law -- that's the principle that we
all hold very dear in this country," Rep. Tom DeLay asserted. "The
rule of law protects you and it protects me from the midnight fire
on our roof or the 3 a.m. knock on our door," warned Rep. Henry
Hyde, one of Clinton's chief accusers. In the face of Bush's more
definitive dismissal of federal law, the silence from these
quarters is deafening.
The president's defenders stoutly contend that war-time
conditions fully justify Bush's actions. And as Lincoln showed
during the Civil War, there may be times of military emergency
where the executive believes it imperative to take immediate,
highly irregular, even unconstitutional steps. "I felt that
measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful," Lincoln
wrote in 1864, "by becoming indispensable to the preservation of
the Constitution, through the preservation of the nation." Bush
seems to think that, since 9/11, he has been placed, by the grace
of God, in the same kind of situation Lincoln faced. But Lincoln,
under pressure of daily combat on American soil against fellow
Americans, did not operate in secret, as Bush has. He did not
claim, as Bush has, that his emergency actions were wholly regular
and constitutional as well as necessary; Lincoln sought and
received Congressional authorization for his suspension of habeas
corpus in 1863. Nor did Lincoln act under the amorphous cover of a
"war on terror" -- a war against a tactic, not a specific nation or
political entity, which could last as long as any president deems
the tactic a threat to national security. Lincoln's exceptional
measures were intended to survive only as long as the Confederacy
was in rebellion. Bush's could be extended indefinitely, as the
president sees fit, permanently endangering rights and liberties
guaranteed by the Constitution to the citizenry.
* * * *
Much as Bush still enjoys support from those who believe he can
do no wrong, he now suffers opposition from liberals who believe he
can do no right. Many of these liberals are in the awkward position
of having supported Bush in the past, while offering little
coherent as an alternative to Bush's policies now. Yet it is
difficult to see how this will benefit Bush's reputation in
history.
The president came to office calling himself "a uniter, not a
divider" and promising to soften the acrimonious tone in
Washington. He has had two enormous opportunities to fulfill those
pledges: first, in the noisy aftermath of his controversial
election in 2000, and, even more, after the attacks of September
11th, when the nation pulled behind him as it has supported no
other president in living memory. Yet under both sets of
historically unprecedented circumstances, Bush has chosen to act in
ways that have left the country less united and more divided, less
conciliatory and more acrimonious -- much like James Buchanan,
Andrew Johnson and Herbert Hoover before him. And, like those three
predecessors, Bush has done so in the service of a rigid ideology
that permits no deviation and refuses to adjust to changing
realities. Buchanan failed the test of Southern secession, Johnson
failed in the face of Reconstruction, and Hoover failed in the face
of the Great Depression. Bush has failed to confront his own
failures in both domestic and international affairs, above all in
his ill-conceived responses to radical Islamic terrorism. Having
confused steely resolve with what Ralph Waldo Emerson called "a
foolish consistency . . . adored by little statesmen," Bush has
become entangled in tragedies of his own making, compounding those
visited upon the country by outside forces.
No historian can responsibly predict the future with absolute
certainty. There are too many imponderables still to come in the
two and a half years left in Bush's presidency to know exactly how
it will look in 2009, let alone in 2059. There have been presidents
-- Harry Truman was one -- who have left office in seeming
disgrace, only to rebound in the estimates of later scholars. But
so far the facts are not shaping up propitiously for George W.
Bush. He still does his best to deny it. Having waved away the
lessons of history in the making of his decisions, the
present-minded Bush doesn't seem to be concerned about his place in
history. "History. We won't know," he told the journalist Bob
Woodward in 2003. "We'll all be dead."
Another president once explained that the judgments of history
cannot be defied or dismissed, even by a president. "Fellow
citizens, we cannot escape history," said Abraham Lincoln.
"We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in
spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance,
can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we
pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest
generation."
2006 Rolling Stone
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