I've condensed the following article, but you can see the complete one at the link provided at the end.
April 11, 2006
Is George W. Bush the worst president in 100 years?
He has always been a polarizing figure, but now his constant battles at home and abroad are taking on historic proportions
On March 16, Iraqi insurgents fired a mortar shell into the U.S. army base in Tikrit, landing near two members of the 101st Airborne Division, reportedly as they stood waiting for a bus. The explosion killed Sgt. Amanda Pinson of St. Louis, Mo., making her the 2,315th U.S. soldier killed in Iraq since the war began three years ago. She was 21.
A few hours later in Washington, the U.S. Senate voted 52-48 to increase the ceiling on the national debt, by $781 billion, to $9 trillion (all figures US$) -- or roughly $30,000 for every man, woman and child in the country -- thus avoiding the first-ever default on U.S. debt. The House of Representatives then approved another $92 billion in federal spending to support the war effort in the Middle East.
That night, Gallup wrapped up its latest opinion poll on Americans' attitudes toward the White House, showing just 37 per cent approve of the President's performance, versus 59 per cent who disapprove -- a drop of five percentage points in a month -- one of the worst scores of any president in the modern era.
Just another day in the life of the world's last superpower under the leadership of President George W. Bush.
With deficits and debt swelling to epic levels, an economy showing massive cracks, and support for America crumbling abroad, the Bush administration finds itself increasingly isolated. With mid-term elections looming in November, the President is now widely seen as a political liability. Republicans are actively distancing themselves from Bush, and joining Democrats in strident critiques of the White House. And things may be getting worse. Last week, court documents emerged showing Scooter Libby, former chief of staff to Vice-President Dick Cheney, testified that Bush authorized the leak of sensitive intelligence to shore up support and discredit critics of the Iraq war, raising, for the first time, the possibility that the President may be personally implicated in a scandal.
*Bush's constant battles at home and abroad are taking on historic proportions, hardening perceptions that his administration is
defined by failure on multiple fronts. Just over 16 months have passed since George W. Bush was elected for the second term that eluded his father, but already historians and pundits are beginning to debate whether he just might be the worst U.S. president in a century.
In 2004, George Mason University polled 415 presidential historians and found 80 per cent considered Bush's first term a failure. More than half considered it the worst presidency since the Great Depression. More than a third called it the worst in 100 years. Eleven per cent said it was the worst ever. Robert McElvaine, a professor of history at Millsaps College in Mississippi, says scores would likely be worse if the poll were repeated today.
"When I filled out that survey I said Bush was the worst since Buchanan [1857-61], but things have gotten worse and now I'd have to consider him the worst ever," McElvaine says. "If you look at the situation he inherited, and the situation following 9/11, he had great opportunities and he basically squandered them. He has put the future of the country in a much more precarious position than it was when he became president."
With just a few years left in his mandate, historians say George W. Bush has no such achievements to offset the grievous cost of Iraq in blood and treasure. Despite the biggest federal spending spree in more than a generation, the Bush White House has produced no transformational vision for domestic policy. His massive tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 have neither sparked the economy nor bolstered his popularity. They have, however, exacerbated a fiscal crisis that threatens to undermine the very basis of the American state. "It used to be a part of the American character to believe in delaying gratification, and saving for the future," McElvaine says. "But it seems the future is being ignored in spectacular fashion by this administration."
Even a couple of years ago this would have sounded like a partisan indictment. But today it is sounding more like the general consensus.
*When George W. Bush took office at the beginning of 2001, he inherited from the Clinton administration a budget surplus of US$86.4 billion. He had campaigned on a promise to use that money for an ambitious program of tax cuts, which he put into action immediately upon arrival in the Oval Office. But Bush's conservative allies had expected those tax cuts to be followed by an equally sweeping review of federal spending. That austerity never came. On the contrary, he's gone on a mammoth spending spree.
Stephen Slivinski, director of budget studies at the Cato Institute, is working on a book about the decline of fiscal conservatism under Bush, and says discontent among conservatives has been building for several years. "People thought over the long term he'd try to do some good and Republicans could finally make good on their promises of getting spending under control, but here we are in the second term and that has not materialized," he says. "The dam has just broken."
They point out that federal spending has risen by $683 billion a year under Bush, less than a third of which has gone to national defence and homeland security.
"No president since FDR has accelerated spending as fast as Bush has," he groans. "I'm shocked about it, but the numbers show what the numbers show."
The Economic Policy Institute recently projected that under the current tax regime, by 2014 all government revenue would be consumed by four budget items: Medicare, Social Security, national defence and interest on the debt. Walker's department forecasts that, at the current rate of growth, the cost of servicing the national debt will consume half of all tax revenues within 25 years.
Bush does have his fiscal defenders, and they generally point out that the national debt rose higher as a percentage of the economy under Reagan. But as Cato's Slivinski points out, there are key differences between the two. For one thing, Reagan's deficits got smaller and more manageable as his presidency went on. The Bush administration is projecting deficits north of $400 billion a year for the foreseeable future. More importantly, as Reagan increased defence spending, he cut other budget items. Bush has allowed spending to rise across the board. "The greatest costs of Bush's legacy are Medicare and Social Security, and those haven't even been seen yet," Slivinski says. "We're going to look back and wonder what the hell Republicans were thinking expanding all these programs at a time when we should've been looking at how to reform them, and pay for them."
America's looming financial crunch would be less daunting if it seemed like the economy was poised to take flight. But among economists there is little hope for such a windfall. With 12.6 per cent growth in GDP and the creation of 2.3 million jobs since 2001, President Bush frequently crows about the world's "pre-eminent" economy. Beneath the surface, critics see a situation far less healthy than it first appears.
Two million new jobs sounds like a lot, but it's the most anemic job creation performance by any president in the postwar era. The gains have also failed to keep pace with the growth of the workforce, and as a result the overall employment rate under Bush has declined from 64.4 per cent to 62.9 per cent. The manufacturing sector has been particularly hard hit, losing 2.9 million jobs since Bush took office, a decline of roughly 17 per cent -- worse than the postwar hangover under Truman, worse than the early '70s stagnation under Nixon, and far worse than the darkest days of Reagan's Rust Belt plant closures. Little wonder that a Gallup poll earlier this year showed more than half of Americans consider the economy only "fair" or "poor," and 52 per cent think it's getting worse.
So while CEOs and politicians can point selectively to indicators of a robust economy, the story on Main Street doesn't look so rosy. Consumers know much of their lifestyle has been financed on credit. Household indebtedness has skyrocketed by 60 per cent to $4.5 trillion in the past five years, and U.S. consumers now owe close to five times as much as they did 20 years ago when adjusted for inflation.
In 1980, Ronald Reagan won the election over Jimmy Carter by repeatedly asking voters, "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?" In 2004, Bush wouldn't have dared ask such a question, and since then things have deteriorated substantially. While not all of this can be blamed on the President, the perception is now taking hold that America's vaunted standard of living is under assault. A decade of improvements in alleviating poverty have reversed in recent years. While the economy has grown, the poverty rate has risen to 12.7 per cent of the population, the highest level since 1998, representing five million people who have fallen into poverty in five years.
Even economists who supported Bush's tax cuts see little hope that they will form the bedrock of a future boom -- not with U.S. consumers so deeply indebted, and with future administrations saddled with massive funding liabilities that will, in all likelihood, force taxes back up again in the near future. But those are long-term concerns, and America has more immediate problems to face.
Trout sensed a global PR disaster on the horizon, and his fears were soon realized. Last June, the Pew Global Attitude Project released its latest international survey on America's image, carrying the remarkably optimistic title "American Character Gets Mixed Reviews." This was technically true, though the "mix" ranged from hostile to scathing. The report found that world attitudes toward the U.S. had deteriorated sharply between 2000 and 2005. In Canada, those with a favourable opinion of the U.S. had slipped from 71 per cent to 59 per cent. In Germany, approval ratings fell from 78 to 41 per cent. The story was even worse in the Muslim world: in Turkey and Pakistan just 23 per cent saw the U.S. in a favourable light. "This is the mother of all branding problems," Trout says now. "What do you do to rebuild America's brand and image? When a business has had a bad run and turned off a lot of its customers, they hang out a big sign that says 'under new management.' And we will get nowhere until we have that sign hanging out there."
According to Pew's research, George W. Bush appears to be at the core of international disfavour. This, says Bruce Buchanan, an expert on presidential politics at the University of Texas, has the potential to be an enduring roadblock to U.S. objectives around the world. "I think it's extremely bad for the United States and for the world," he says. "The chances of us continuing to be seen as an honest broker is seriously compromised, and I think that hurts our interests in the long run. Where else can you put the blame? The buck stops on the President's desk. He's the man in charge."
Robert Dallek, a presidential historian and professor emeritus at Dartmouth University, agrees. He has written books on John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, is now working on a biography of Richard Nixon, and says no other president has been so universally reviled around the world as Bush, with the possible exception of Johnson. "There is an old weakness in our foreign policy," Dallek says. "We make the mistake of believing that inside every foreigner there is an American just waiting to emerge. It's just not true. Woodrow Wilson made that mistake, and George Bush is making it again. The whole notion that you can export democracy at the point of a bayonet simply does not work."
Observers say these foreign controversies would be easily manageable, if not for a steady stream of domestic missteps eroding confidence in the administration. The bungled relief effort following hurricane Katrina, Bush's aborted attempt to appoint his close friend, the woefully underqualified Harriet Miers, to the Supreme Court, and Scooter Libby's revelations about the ongoing CIA leak affair, have all contributed to the President's slide. Asked for a one-word description of the President, the most common response was "incompetent," followed closely by "idiot" and "liar." A year ago, the top response was "honest."
Decades from now, academics will debate fiscal policy, jobs, the UN and the Supreme Court, but only as footnotes to another stark question: when that mortar shell killed Amanda Pinson on March 16, less than three years after she graduated from high school and immediately enlisted, was her sacrifice and that of more than 2,300 others in vain, or in the service of a noble, world-changing cause?
Bruce Buchanan, for one, isn't willing to write Bush's name among the worst presidents of all time just yet. "Short-term perspectives have a short shelf life," he says. "It is possible he's set in motion forces that might turn out in his favour years down the line. Perhaps breaking those eggs over there in Iraq will result in the eventual rooting of democracy in the Middle East. But that's the citizen's dilemma: we must judge in the here and now."
For now, the pessimists outnumber the believers. And with every one of Bush's former allies that turns away from his leadership, the margin grows and the odds get longer.
The link:
http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/politics/article.jsp?content=20060417_125323_125323
