With roughly 1,000 days left in his presidency, George W. Bush is doomed to failure. At least that’s the impression you’ll get from this article detailing a survey of historians.
It’s the same subject of the latest cover story from that font of journalistic wisdom, Rolling Stone. (I found much more entertaining the RS article about the post-Jessica life of Nick Lachey.)
Our 43rd president could very well end up joining the list of the nation’s worst presidents, but now is not the time for that assessment.
Let’s look back at history.
A 1962 poll of 75 historians conducted by Arthur Schlesinger ranked Lincoln as our best president; in 1982, a Chicago Tribune survey of 49 historians yielded the same result.
That outcome makes sense, but few would have predicted it in 1864, near the end of Lincoln’s first term. Many of his fellow Republicans wanted to dump Honest Abe from the ’64 ticket because of setbacks in the Civil War.
As Paul F. Boller Jr. records in his book Presidential Campaigns (Oxford University Press, 2004):
“[T]here were those in Lincoln’s party who were anxious to ‘swap horses’ in midstream. ‘Mr. Lincoln is already beaten,’ wailed Horace Greeley. ‘He cannot be elected. And we must have another ticket to save us from utter overthrow.’ The Radical Republicans blamed Lincoln for reverses on the battlefield; they also thought he favored a ‘soft’ policy toward the South after the war.”
Those Radicals did more than complain; they chose 1856 Republican presidential nominee John Fremont to run against Lincoln in 1864. Lincoln ran on a national ticket with Democrat (and Raleigh native) Andrew Johnson.
Had Lincoln survived the 1865 assassination, his historical position could have taken a hit. He did favor a less punitive approach to Reconstruction than the Radical Republicans. We know that Johnson’s willingness to fight Congress led to his impeachment. (He survived the impeachment trial by a single vote.)
Had Lincoln fought Congress on the Reconstruction issues, he might have run into some of the legislative roadblocks that would have clouded his legacy as the Great Emancipator. Vitriol among the Radicals would have colored at least some contemporary opinions about him. It’s hard to say whether those problems would have had a long-term impact on Lincoln’s legacy.
I write none of this to diminish Lincoln, to prop up Bush, or to compare Bush to Lincoln. What I’m saying is that now is not the time to assess Bush’s historical stature. Historians should know this fact. Their survey serves no useful purpose in 2006 (outside of typical election-year politics).
