Buchanan’s lack of leadership helped make it inevitable. And you could say the same of a couple of previous antebellum presidents, I agree. Buchanan, who announced in his inaugural address that he would not seek his second term, was the most guilty among them. The Civil War did begin under Lincoln, but Fort Sumter was all of a month after his inauguration, so you can’t put all of it on Lincoln. :rolleyes:
Even if you discount 2008, Bush’s Presidency had the second lowest average GDP growth post-WWII (Ford did slightly worse, but then he had an abbreviated Presidency). And wages for large portions of the population were relatively stagnant even compared to the smaller then normal GDP growth. And of course, if you throw in 2008, his numbers look much worse.
Granted “worst President” is probably hyperbole, but bottom five is pretty easily defensible.
Yea, FWIW, Bush did eventually seem to learn from his mistakes. He did what needed to be done regarding the Banking crisis, he got rid of the wannabe Cold-Warriors he’d put in charge of the Iraq war and replaced them with people who knew what they were doing, he put the kabosh on some of the worst human rights abuses against suspect terrorists (granted that was in part because the SCOTUS made him), and started to reign in the deficit.
Who knows, given a sixteen year term, Bush might’ve come off looking a lot better, but he only got eight and managed to screw up 6-7 of those years, and that’s what history will judge him on.
When he was (elected) he had a country with peace, prosperity and a balanced budget. He trashed it all. He saw a surplus and decided to give it to his friends. But he couldn’t stop there ,he passed another tax cut to the wealthy. He redistributed the wealth of America .
What’s your metric for measuring how bad he was? If it’s by war, LBJ killed a hell of a lot more people, Americans and foreigners alike. If it’s by domestic issues, Carter’s economic policy was not even a disaster, because that would imply that he had one. Social policy? Bush had nothing on slavery, anti-miscegenation, Jim Crow segregation… hell, he wasn’t even responsible for DOMA or DADT. His wasn’t even close to the most corrupt administration we’ve ever had, little things like Credit Mobilier, Teapot Dome and Watergate come to mind.
It may seem that I’m defending the guy. I’m really not. I’m simply pointing out that as bad as you think he was, someone else did it worse. I have no dispute with putting him on the lower end of the scale, but he certainly wasn’t the worst President we’ve ever had. Scaling everything he did from 1-10, he pulls 3-5 pretty much across the board.
This, and what most other people are saying. If he had been an enemy agent, he would have had a hard time doing more damage. He severely damaged America on all levels; morally, economically, politically, militarily, diplomatically.
Did he start an actual civil war? No. But that would have been impractical to pull off in 8 years from a standing start even on purpose.
The reason why you hear “Worst President ever!” has nothing to do with an objective analysis of his failures and accomplishments. Anybody posting here is doing so based on their frame of reference. In memory, the Presidents I have to compare this guy to are Reagan, GHW Bush, and Clinton. Most of us are taught a decent level of history on Washington and Lincoln, and due to exposure to our elders we receive decent exposure to FD Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Nixon (I rarely hear much said about Ford or Eisenhower).
Now how could GW Bush look like anything but the bottom-of-the-barrell compared to these other Presidents? I do want to thank GW Bush for increasing my esteem for Reagan by roughly 1000-fold.
Enjoy today’s dose of the obvious.
Abu Ghraib and the sanctioning of torture as policy
Well…I don’t think you are going to get an unbiased assessment of GW here on the SD. For that matter, I don’t think enough time has passed for historians to yet make an unclouded assessment, gauged against the future course of events effected by Bush’s policies and decisions.
That said, was he ‘That Bad’? Yeah, he was. Oh, he wasn’t the worst president evah…that’s just partisan silliness and rantage. Clearly there have been worst presidents. Hell, IMHO there have been worse presidents in my lifetime. But he was a weak president, and his mistakes far outweighed the few things he managed to get right. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were both riddled with bad judgment and mistakes, and it will take years for the US to recover from them. Whether you were for the wars in Iraq and/or Afghanistan, the actual prosecution of both of those wars was a travesty. On the economic side, while many of the current problems stemmed from things that pre-dated Bush’s administration, I have to say that overall the lions share of the blamage rightfully falls in his lap, as they happened on his watch…and he was so focused on foreign issues that he wasn’t paying attention to the gorilla in the living room.
I disagree that Katrina is something that can or should be laid at Bush’s feet, as I think there is enough blame to go around. As with many things that happened during the Bush years I think that this has been blown all out of proportion (blame wise) by partisans who were eager to fixate on anything they could pin on GW. That said, however, I think that there are plenty of REAL things that can and should (and will by future historians) be pinned on the man that he will most likely end up at best in the bottom 3rd of presidents, and, were I to make a bet, I’d say in the bottom 10. Possibly the bottom 5.
So…yeah. He was that bad.
-XT
LBJ did not start the war. Lots of people at the time said that it was in America’s interest to prosecute. For Iraq, first it was no threat to us, second it was prosecuted incompetently at the beginning (and Bush did not get rid of Rummy for 6 years) and most importantly, it took resources away from a war that was in our national interest.
Carter did not start with a great economy and ruin it, and the stagflation of 1979-1980 is nowhere near the mess Bush made for us. Plus he didn’t manage to turn a surplus into a deficit. He was also more honest - Bush tried to make the budget look better by keeping the cost of the wars off the books, and insulted the American public by implying that we would be unwilling to support the war through a tax increase.
Presidents weren’t responsible for those things. Slavery was in the Constitution, alas. His people were more like the Watergate burglars than those who stole money, being corrupt for ideological reasons, not monetary ones. See the political test for the DoJ.
LBJ may get negative points on Vietnam, but he gets a solid 10 about getting civil rights legislation and Medicare through Congress. I wonder what you think Bush gets a 5 on? He was on the side of the angels about immigration, but he couldn’t even move his own party enough to get anything done.
I think we are judging worst president, not nastiest guy. On the nice guy scale, Bush isn’t anywhere close to the bottom. On the competence scale, he is way below Jackson and Harding, if only because Harding didn’t live long enough to really screw anything up.
Just because I brought this up first: Nagin and Landrieu deserve plenty of blame, for starters. But neither of them put Michael Brown in charge of FEMA. Too much gets made of ‘The Pet Goat,’ but Bush’s delayed response to the hurricane and the flooding were that bad. And not nearly enough was done to help New Orleans in the remaining 3 1/2 years of his term.
Well, MMV and probably does, but my own reading on it is that it really didn’t matter who was in charge of FEMA in the immediate aftermath. The system was what it was, and it was going to take a major shock in order to get change to permeate through the organization…and it just happens that that shock came on Bush’s watch. Had Obama been president, or had Katrina happened this year instead of in 2005 I think the results would have been essentially the same. Obama wouldn’t have been focused on revamping FEMA from the top down either (without the example of Katrina and the lessons learned), nothing would have been done in New Orleans (except more corruption and graft where it came to the levees ), and the response would nor could have been any faster considering the damage to the infrastructure, the delays at the local level, the disconnect between the local administrators and the Federal Government, and a host of other things.
While I don’t leave Bush blameless on this, I think that it’s the system itself that was (and possibly still is) at fault…a systemic problem that no one president could have mitigated, not without a crystal ball (or the shock of something like this that wakes up the public and the government together).
-XT
Other people have addressed immigration. As for Medicare, he did it with big and unnecessary payments to private firms which cost more than if the government did it, and, worse, he never funded it.
Well, for the banking mess the only credit he deserves is at last getting that he was way out of his depth, and basically withdrawing from the crisis except for a brief speech or two. He let people who knew something do it, and didn’t listen to the conservative nitwits who dominated his party. I’m not sure this qualifies as great leadership. As for being a past president, I’ll agree that he is a lot better and quieter than Cheney. I’m not sure if it is the case that no one wants to hear from him or that now that he is out of the bubble it has finally sunk in that he screwed the pooch in a big way. If he was evil, it is from sins of omission not commission, unlike his VP.
LBJ lobbied for and got the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed. He escalated the situation in Vietnam from advisory status to full involvement. It happened on his watch.
In the late 1970s inflation was out of control and interest rates of over 20% were the norm, a far cry from today. It happened on Carter’s watch.
It happened on their watch.
Note the repetitive theme there. Great stock is placed on that phrase around here. 9/11 happened on Bush’s watch, so it’s his fault. Fine. So, to be fair, stop trying to exonerate others for things that happened on their watch.
I have little knowledge about Buchanan, Pierce, etc. The case you’ve made is that they were hurtled along helplessly by history and didn’t do anything and should have summoned up super presidency powers that had not really existed before (except Louisiana Purchase) and were largely invented by Lincoln and would have resulted in the destruction of the Union if attempted by anyone less skilled than Lincoln. Those guys were utterly lackluster, but they did hold it together until Lincoln got there. Had it been anyone else other than Lincoln that they passed off to, the Union would have ended. They got lucky. But the nature of the crisis that had been brewing for decades was not one that was going to end short of the Union dissolving unless someone could manage to drum up a war to save it. Lincoln was able to.
The question of the thread is who is the biggest screw up as President. Who screwed up the most and biggest. Yeah, the Harding Admin was corrupt, but hardly the first or last corrupt administration. And the corruption didn’t put the country at great risk.
The pre-Civil war presidents went with the flow and did nothing to prevent the impending disaster. But they did manage to put it off.
After criticism of FEMA on Bush the Elder’s watch (and possibly before) Clinton put in an expert, and there was fairly good agreement that FEMA was working. Bush went back to putting in an inexperienced political hack. He might not have been able to make the flood go away, but he could have responded a lot faster and more effectively. It is well known that New Orleans did not get adequate top level attention (remember Bush’s DVD) for days. It was not like an earthquake site in the middle of the mountains - there were plenty of ways to get help to them faster. That local and state agencies were far from perfect in no way excuses FEMA.
It’s fear, I suspect. He can’t shove everyone who disagrees with him off into “free speech zones” anymore if he were to show up in public. And without sitting-President levels of security he probably fears assassination.
Did he fire all of the people working at FEMA? Did he radically change all of the SOPs and contingency plans? If not, then it doesn’t matter. The guy at the head of an organization like FEMA is a figure head. The people who do the actual work at the non-political appointed bureaucratic drones who continue on regardless of which party is in power. The problems in New Orleans had as much to do with local issues as it did with response issue from FEMA…in fact, more so, IMHO.
As to the the rest, the entire region around New Orleans was devastated. It was a logistics nightmare to get stuff in and out of the area on a dime, despite the fact that people were watching it on TV. I know this from personal experience, since I went down there as a volunteer working on telecommunications. It took time to clear away the wreckage in order to get the logistics into the area quickly enough to start making a difference.
I know I’m not going to change your (or anyone else here’s) mind on this, so let’s just agree to disagree and leave it at that, ehe? There were plenty of other, real things he did that one can focus on when assessing if he was ‘that bad’…
-XT
I’m struck by how many people find it palatable to say that GW Bush was among the five worst, but NO OF COURSE HE WASN’T THE WORST IT WOULD BE STUPID TO SAY SO.
I really can’t figure out why this is. Do you have some credence if you place him with four other shit presidents that is lost if you happen to say that he’s the worst?
Of course, I have no problem in saying that he is by far, clearly and easily, the worst president our country has ever endured.
Airman Doors, if you have to pick out a dozen other presidents to cite for their signficant failings that are matched by Bush, what does that say?
I told you I wasn’t defending the man, and I have not in fact done so. I have pointed out that worse things have happened and worse things will happen in the future. Was he the worst President in my lifetime? Undoubtedly. Was he the worst ever? No.