Presidential Destiny: The Sequel

Nearly two years ago, while wondering why in the world any electorate would actually elect the second president Bush to a second term (all the while wondering whether we'd ever know whether he was actually elected by a majority of votes cast) I wrote*

I suspect that the current president's [i.e., G.W.Bush's] destiny is to go down in history as the worst president we've ever had; the second term is just the means to cement that destiny against pretenders and wanna-bes like Nixon, for example.

Vindication is at last mine! In today's Washington Post# historian Eric Foner writes

Historians are loath to predict the future. It is impossible to say with certainty how Bush will be ranked in, say, 2050. But somehow, in his first six years in office he has managed to combine the lapses of leadership, misguided policies and abuse of power of his failed predecessors. I think there is no alternative but to rank him as the worst president in U.S. history.

———-
*"Presidential Destiny", Bearcastle Blog, 7 December 2004.

#Eric Foner, "He's The Worst Ever", Washington Post, 3 December 2006.

Posted on December 3, 2006 at 01.43 by jns · Permalink
In: All, Splenetics

2 Responses

Subscribe to comments via RSS

  1. Written by S.W. Anderson
    on Monday, 4 December 2006 at 02.00
    Permalink

    Phrased in the manner of an academic, but right on target.

    I have no trepidation about predicting some things for the future. One is that if we get a president worse than George W. Bush between now and 2050, this country's going down, maybe to never get back up. If that happens, people won't be standing around complaining because a historian back in '06 made a faulty prediction. They'll have much more serious things to go on about.

  2. Written by S.W. Anderson
    on Monday, 4 December 2006 at 02.02
    Permalink

    It should be obvious, but just in case, my remark about an academic's phrasing refers to Foner, not to Jeff who straight out called a spade a spade.

Subscribe to comments via RSS

Leave a Reply

To thwart spam, comments by new people are held for moderation; give me a bit of time and your comment will show up.

I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.