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Tuesday, 12 December 2006 18:40 |
 | | Mark West |
What makes for a terrible president?
Happily, The Washington Post is willing to help answer that question with its occasional op-ed pieces in which eminent scholars are asked to rank U.S. presidents.
Usually, those rankings pass without much comment. Franklin Pierce, James K. Polk, Warren Harding, Richard Nixon and the other inept or criminally inclined presidents the nation has suffered under make the list, as they always do.
But
this time, there was an addition, and there was a general consensus
among the scholars about why that new name belonged on the list.
Eric Foner, the
DeWitt Clinton professor of history at Columbia University, was one of
the panelists the Post asked to rank presidents. Foner describes, by
example, what makes for a bad president:
"At a time of
national crisis, Pierce and Buchanan, who served in the eight years
preceding the Civil War, and Johnson, who followed it, were simply not
up to the job. Stubborn, narrow-minded, unwilling to listen to
criticism or to consider alternatives to disastrous mistakes, they
surrounded themselves with sycophants and shaped their policies to
appeal to retrogressive political forces...."
And the new name that Foner and others nominated for the list of the worst presidents ever was that of George W. Bush.
Douglas
Brinkley, director of the Roosevelt Center at Tulane University and
editor of the Ronald Reagan presidential diaries by request of his
family, concurs:
"There isnët
much that Bush can do now to salvage his reputation. His presidential
library will someday be built around two accomplishments: that after
9/11, the U.S. homeland wasnët again attacked by terrorists (knock on
wood) and that he won two presidential elections, allowing him to
appoint conservatives to key judicial posts."
Well, thereës a legacy for you. His greatest claim to fame is going to be that he ... won elections!
Perhaps no
clearer example of the ineptitude, or malfeasance, of the current
president came than when he nominated the now-gone and utterly
unlamented John Bolton to represent the United States at the U.N. This
was a man who Bush appointed to that position, despite the following
statements he had made concerning that institution:
"The Secretariat building in New York has 38 stories. If you lost 10 stories today, it wouldnët make a bit of difference."
"There is no
such thing as the United Nations. There is an international community
that occasionally can be led by the only real power left in the world,
and that is the United States, when it suits our interest and we can
get others to go along."
"If I were
redoing the Security Council today, Iëd have one permanent member
because thatës the real reflection of the distribution of power in the
world ... the United States."
"It is a big
mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it
may seem in our short-term interest to do so ÇƒÓ because, over the long
term, the goal of those who think that international law really means
anything are those who want to constrict the United States. We ought to
be concerned about this so-called right of humanitarian intervention."
Clearly, then,
Bolton had no use for the U.N. In some important sense, he didnët even
believe that it existed. But in an administration where ideology,
rather than fact, had the last word, he was thought an ideal candidate.
Perhaps, as some
think, the positioning of Robert Gates as the secretary of defense
means that the Bush administration is becoming, as the current slang
puts it, "fact-based."
Weëll see. But I
think it more likely that we will see the Bush administration
maneuvering and wheedling for support for an invasion of Iran ǃÓ
demonstrating, once again, the profoundly delusional nature of the
neoconservative dreamscape.
ï
Mark West is a professor of mass communications at UNC Asheville.
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