Making History
Making it up. Making a mockery of it. Ninety-eight percent of historians polled consider Bush a failure. US News and World Report:
President Bush often argues that history will vindicate him. So he can’t be pleased with an informal survey of 109 professional historians conducted by the History News Network. It found that 98 percent of them believe that Bush’s presidency has been a failure, while only about 2 percent see it as a success. Not only that, more than 61 percent of the historians say the current presidency is the worst in American history. In 2004, only 11.6 percent of the historians rated Bush’s presidency in last place. Among the reasons given for his low ratings: invading Iraq, “tax breaks for the rich,” and alienating many nations around the world.
That looks more like political commentary than history to me, but what do I know. I’m not a professional historian, though I’ve always had the sense history is one of those things, like political commentary, that is heavily influenced by the eye of the beholder.
Bush supporters counter that professional historians today tend to be liberal and that it’s too early to assess how his policies will turn out.
In fact, it looks more like prophecy. Can we get a poll of professional historians on whether it is possible to historically rate a presidency that hasn’t ended yet?
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:28 pm Comments (6) on Monday, April 14, 2008
6 Responses to “Making History”
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April 15th, 2008 at 12:14 am
I’ll bet these same guys were polled in 1988 and said that Reagan’s presidency was the worst in American history too. Even leaving aside Jimmy Carter’s, which has to be considered far worse than Bush’s, at least Bush didn’t sit around sucking his thumb while a Civil War brewed up, like Buchanan did.
Really this poll is nonsense. Like Jules said, it’s just a bunch of political opinions, and by people who don’t even think for themselves, but go along with the great, lowing liberal herd in academia. You might just as well ask kindergarteners.
April 15th, 2008 at 9:58 am
Harry Truman had a 22% approval rating when he left office, and the intellectual class had an intense dislike for him at the time, too. A poll like this at the end of his second term would probably have had similar results.
April 15th, 2008 at 11:26 am
I have a BA in history and a minor in political philosophy from Indiana University. Compared to most east coast colleges, this place is reasonably conservative. However, I found that every one of my history professors found it necessary to make make snide comments about Bush, conservatives, America etc. These comments were not only unrelated to the class discussion, they were often outside the bounds of reality. One professor, an expert on Soviet Russia, said he believed that the American press was so intimidated by the Bush junta vis-à-vis Iraq etc that it could hardly be considered a free press. This from a man who has an intimate knowledge of the *USSR*. I don’t know how any historian worth his salt could make a judgement on a presidency 10-15 years later, much less before the president leaves office.
On a happier note, my political philosophy professors were so professional that I truly don’t know their political persuasion, though this very lack of information makes me think they lean right. I really wish I’d gone for a polysci degree instead of history.
April 15th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
History will vindicate George Bush, although sadly, probably not in his lifetime or ours. It will take a new generation of historians who are interested in research and the facts of the past, not the heated politics of our moment of time, to ferret out the truth. It’s always been that way, and probably always will be.
April 16th, 2008 at 1:16 am
I don’t know Rebecca. If we fail in Iraq because the next President pulls us out before the job is done Bush will go down in history as a reckless fool. Only if we win in Iraq will he be vindicated, especially if liberalization spreads (finally) through the Arab world and damps down terrorism, which was the key objective of the Iraq Campaign in the first place, although Bush’s critics generally have too little wit to comprehend it.
It is interesting that Bush understood from the first something that few others seem to understand, even some among our generals. That is, we cannot win the war against the jihadists by standing on the defensive. We would have to defend literally everything, for everything would be a target for the terrorists. This is basically what the Dems want to do, when they advocate a “law enforcement strategy” against terrorism, which did not work at all well in the 90s. We had to take the fight to the terrorists, and Iraq was the best place to do this after we ran them out of Afghanistan. It allowed us to seize the initiative from the enemy, to make him react to our moves rather than we to his. This is an essential aspect to winning in any war, and it is funny that so few people seem to understand it.
April 16th, 2008 at 10:07 am
Bush defeated the Taliban and Saddam Hussein and has OBL hiding out in the woods somewhere. He put Roberts and Alito on the bench. He cut taxes until the Democrats took over and decided to sink the boat, raise taxes and sell tax loopholes to their political contributors. He has fostered a culture of life in a nation raised on MTV morality. He invested heavily in Africa and in alternative energy. I hardly think he should worry about what the left-leaning historians think. It will be difficult for anyone to do better than Bush at trying to get this world back on track. His greatness is merely obscured by his own modesty and the confused and troubling policies of people like Nancy Pelosi, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama.