J. TODD FOSTER: Bush Worked Hard To Earn Title Of Worst President

Two days from now, America will breathe a collective sigh of relief. The worst presidency in modern history – possibly U.S. history – mercifully will be over.

Who among us can honestly say they are better off today than eight years ago? Only the descendants of Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson – frequently recognized before now as the four worst presidents ever. Those families waited and prayed for generations for a guy like George W. Bush to come along.

And no, it’s not too early to render such a judgment despite Bush’s 2003 statement to journalist Bob Woodward: “History. We won’t know. We’ll all be dead.”

What an orator.

Many professional historians already have concluded that W stands for Worst. Of 109 interviewed in early 2008 by the History News Network, two historians rated his presidency a success; 107 rated it a failure. Sixty-one percent rated it the worst ever. Another 35 percent rated Bush’s presidency as among the worst.

And that was before the economy collapsed.

“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,” Columbia University history professor Eric Foner wrote two years ago. “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 (in that era, pro-slavery and racist ideologues). Even after being repudiated in the midterm elections of 1854, 1858 and 1866, respectively, they ignored major currents of public opinion and clung to flawed policies. Bush’s presidency certainly brings theirs to mind.”

I used to think Bush was a decent fellow who was in over his head. He reminded me of a Saint Bernard left alone in a house. The dog’s master returns home and finds broken dishes, a chewed couch and other rampant destruction, but the dog is cheerfully wagging his tail and wanting to go for a walk.

Bush is oblivious like the Saint Bernard. But he possesses numerous dangerous qualities, which taken alone are bad enough.

Together, they forge a toxic cocktail.

Lazy. Stubborn. Arrogant. Apathetic. A lack of intellect and curiosity about how the world works and thinks. A man who sees the world in black and white, instead of nuanced in shades of gray. A man who believes God truly only blesses America and that the U.S. has a monopoly on good, while anyone who disagrees with us is evil.

“No individual president can compare to the second Bush,” one historian wrote in that History News Network survey. “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.”

America’s standards for its presidents are not impossibly high. We want someone who is among the smartest in the room, who works hard, who reads his briefing papers, who listens to reason and, when he fails, is willing to admit it and change course.

W can’t bring himself to admit a single mistake – only “disappointments,” including the inexplicable “disappointment” of not finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Disappointment is when Baskin-Robbins is out of your favorite flavor. When it rains out your softball game. When you lose at B-I-N-G-O.

Disaster is when you wrongly invade a country, kill tens of thousands of civilians and send several thousand of your own soldiers and Marines to their deaths. Incompetence and cronyism, not disappointment, result when you preside over the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. Only political stupidity and lack of empathy would allow an American city to drown while you vacation and play the guitar in California – a modern-day Nero fiddling while Rome burned.

Speaking of vacations, Bush had nearly twice as many of them as press conferences. He chopped more wood, rode more bikes and played more video games than any president in history.

Even the people he surrounded himself with – notably Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales – will go down as among the worst in history.

“With his unprovoked and disastrous war of aggression in Iraq and his monstrous deficits, Bush has set this country on a course that will take decades to correct,” said another historian. “When future historians look back to identify the moment at which the United States began to lose its position of world leadership, they will point – rightly – to the Bush presidency. Thanks to his policies, it is now easy to see America losing out to its competitors in any number of areas: China is rapidly becoming the manufacturing powerhouse of the next century, India the high tech and services leader, and Europe the region with the best quality of life.”

None of us knows what kind of president Barack Obama will be. But we do know this: Obama is whip smart, pragmatic and eloquent. He reads real books and writes them, too. He can string together words in a manner that inspires Americans, not makes us international laughingstocks. And – the ridiculous label of socialist aside – Obama already has shown himself to be a common-sense centrist.

In 2000, this nation had the opportunity – and actually did by popular vote – to elect the smartest candidate.

The Electoral College, aided by the Supreme Court, threw the presidency to the guy most of us preferred to share a beer with.

We know what a smart president can do. Bill Clinton was an intellectual giant – above the waist anyway – and tireless. He balanced budgets and generated surpluses.

W has put your grandchildren in hock. That’s what happens when you elect a president who’s the smartest person in the room only when he’s alone.

By now, some of you are accusing me of being overly harsh. You probably don’t have relatives who are so afraid of traveling overseas as Americans that they put Canadian maple leaf stickers on their luggage.

And then there’s my latest 401(k) statement. I’ll have to work until I’m 90 to afford retirement. And you think I’m ornery now.

J. Todd Foster is managing editor of the Bristol Herald Courier and can be reached at jfoster@bristolnews.com or (276) 645-2513.