Worst. President. Ever.

With the President now as lame a duck as one can get, more and more scholars are finding it safe to dump him in the "worst President ever" slot (or, at best, in the bottom five).

If anyone is interested, I laid out my case for why he is the worst ever in the comments section of a blog entry this past April. It was a pretty detailed case by blog standards. Basically, I noted that with other 'worst ever' candidates (Hoover, Nixon) you can surely find some successes overshadowed by their larger failings, whereas President Bush has no actual accomplishments to point to. Lyndon Johnson may have started the Vietnam war, but at least he had the Great Society. Richard Nixon may have continued that war and committed constitutional crimes, but at least his record shows many domestic achievements and that historic trip to China. Etc etc.

What does George W. Bush have? A couple of questionable tax cuts? What a legacy. All he has is Iraq, Katrina, a botched war on terror, Big Brother and other constitutional affronts, a middle class in shambles, religious fanaticism triumphing over scientific progress, a divided populace, and more than can be written in this space. President Buchanan may have failed to prevent a civil war, but I bet he wouldn't have treated Terri Schiavo with more urgency than he does matters of war.

In addition, I noted that our most popular leaders (Lincoln, FDR) have inherited bad situations and made the country remarkably better in their wake. Mr. Bush inherited a semi-divided country and made it worse, creating numerous new problems for his successors to clean up in his wake. His presidency has been a failure on every measurable level. The fact is that we have an empty shell for a leader; a man guided more by ideology than by any discernible policies.

Now, as I noted, more people are making these same arguments (it's not just liberal bloggers and Rolling Stone anymore). Salon's Tim Grieve has a sampling of where some are placing George W. Bush on the rankings of U.S. Presidents...

Historian Douglas Brinkley: "Though Bush may be viewed as a laughingstock, he won't have the zero-integrity factors that have kept Nixon and Harding at the bottom in the presidential sweepstakes. Oddly, the president whom Bush most reminds me of is Herbert Hoover, whose name is synonymous with failure to respond to the Great Depression. When the stock market collapsed, Hoover, for ideological reasons, did too little. When 9/11 happened, Bush did too much, attacking the wrong country at the wrong time for the wrong reasons. He has joined Hoover as a case study on how not to be president."

Rutgers professor David Greenberg: "As the now-flourishing reputations of Truman, Eisenhower and Reagan attest, the antipathy a president elicits from his contemporaries usually fades over time. And as Nixon's still-dismal reputation also attests, in the contest for the dubious title of 'worst president,' Bush faces stiff competition ... Bush has two years left in his presidency and we don't know what they'll hold. They may be as dismal as the first six. Future investigations may bear out many people's worst fears about this administration's violations of civil liberties. And it's conceivable that the consequences of the invasion of Iraq may prove more destructive than those of Nixon's stubborn continuation of the Vietnam War. Should those things happen, Bush will be able to lay a claim to the mantle of U.S. history's worst president. For now, though, I'm sticking with Dick."

New America Foundation senior fellow Michael Lind:"It's unfair to claim that George W. Bush is the worst president of all time. He's merely the fifth worst ... Andrew Jackson's victory in the Battle of New Orleans (waged two weeks after the United States and Britain, unknown to Jackson, had signed a peace treaty) helped Americans pretend that the War of 1812 was something other than a total wipe-out. By contrast, George W. Bush has inadvertently destroyed only Baghdad, not Washington, and the costs of the Iraq war in blood and treasure are far less than those of Korea and Vietnam ... The fact that Bush followed the invasion of Afghanistan, which had sheltered al-Qaeda, with the toppling of Saddam Hussein, will puzzle historians for centuries. It is as though, after Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor, FDR had asked Congress to declare war on Argentina."

University of Massachusetts professor Vincent J. Cannato: "Much of Bush's legacy will rest on the future trajectory of the fight against terrorism, the nation's continued security and the evolving direction of the Middle East. Things may look grim today, but that doesn't ensure a grim future ... But history should at least teach us humility. Time will cool today's political passions. As years pass, more documents will be released, more insights gleaned and the broader picture of this era will be painted. Only then will we begin to see how George W. Bush fares in the pantheon of U.S. presidents."

The only saving grace here for Bush seems to be summarized as 'The fallout from his gross incompetence, stupidity, and failure couldn've been a lot, lot worse'. Touche, historians, touche. And I think that could make a nice subtitle for his biography.

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