[Mb-civic] Worst President Ever?

[Allison Burnett]

> ------ Forwarded Message
> From: Reinhard Denke <reinhard at stimmung.tv>
> Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2006 08:44:34 -0700
> To: Allison Burnett <nemo1043 at yahoo.com>
> Subject: FOUND IT!
> 

> The Worst President in History?
> 
> One of America's leading historians assesses George W. Bush
> 
> 
> George W. Bush's presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace.
> Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September
> 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again,
> there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on
> the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario.
> Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as
> the very worst president in all of American history.
> From time to time, after hours, I kick back with my colleagues at Princeton to
> argue idly about which president really was the worst of them all. For years,
> these perennial debates have largely focused on the same handful of chief
> executives whom national polls of historians, from across the ideological and
> political spectrum, routinely cite as the bottom of the presidential barrel.
> Was the lousiest James Buchanan, who, confronted with Southern secession in
> 1860, dithered to a degree that, as his most recent biographer has said,
> probably amounted to disloyalty -- and who handed to his successor, Abraham
> Lincoln, a nation already torn asunder? Was it Lincoln's successor, Andrew
> Johnson, who actively sided with former Confederates and undermined
> Reconstruction? What about the amiably incompetent Warren G. Harding, whose
> administration was fabulously corrupt? Or, though he has his defenders,
> Herbert Hoover, who tried some reforms but remained imprisoned in his own
> outmoded individualist ethic and collapsed under the weight of the
> stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression's onset? The younger historians
> always put in a word for Richard M. Nixon, the only American president forced
> to resign from office.
> Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst
> ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the
> nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the
> Bush administration a "failure." Among those who called Bush a success, many
> gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support
> and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the
> administration's "pursuit of disastrous policies." In fact, roughly one in ten
> of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the
> best president since Bill Clinton -- a category in which Bush is the only
> contestant.
> The lopsided decision of historians should give everyone pause. Contrary to
> popular stereotypes, historians are generally a cautious bunch. We assess the
> past from widely divergent points of view and are deeply concerned about being
> viewed as fair and accurate by our colleagues. When we make historical
> judgments, we are acting not as voters or even pundits, but as scholars who
> must evaluate all the evidence, good, bad or indifferent. Separate surveys,
> conducted by those perceived as conservatives as well as liberals, show
> remarkable unanimity about who the best and worst presidents have been.
> Historians do tend, as a group, to be far more liberal than the citizenry as a
> whole -- a fact the president's admirers have seized on to dismiss the poll
> results as transparently biased. One pro-Bush historian said the survey
> revealed more about "the current crop of history professors" than about Bush
> or about Bush's eventual standing. But if historians were simply motivated by
> a strong collective liberal bias, they might be expected to call Bush the
> worst president since his father, or Ronald Reagan, or Nixon. Instead, more
> than half of those polled -- and nearly three-fourths of those who gave Bush a
> negative rating -- reached back before Nixon to find a president they
> considered as miserable as Bush. The presidents most commonly linked with Bush
> included Hoover, Andrew Johnson and Buchanan. Twelve percent of the historians
> polled -- nearly as many as those who rated Bush a success -- flatly called
> Bush the worst president in American history. And these figures were gathered
> before the debacles over Hurricane Katrina, Bush's role in the Valerie Plame
> leak affair and the deterioration of the situation in Iraq. Were the
> historians polled today, that figure would certainly be higher.
> Even worse for the president, the general public, having once given Bush the
> highest approval ratings ever recorded, now appears to be coming around to the
> dismal view held by most historians. To be sure, the president retains a
> considerable base of supporters who believe in and adore him, and who reject
> all criticism with a mixture of disbelief and fierce contempt -- about
> one-third of the electorate. (When the columnist Richard Reeves publicized the
> historians' poll last year and suggested it might have merit, he drew
> thousands of abusive replies that called him an idiot and that praised Bush
> as, in one writer's words, "a Christian who actually acts on his deeply held
> beliefs.") Yet the ranks of the true believers have thinned dramatically. A
> majority of voters in forty-three states now disapprove of Bush's handling of
> his job. Since the commencement of reliable polling in the 1940s, only one
> twice-elected president has seen his ratings fall as low as Bush's in his
> second term: Richard Nixon, during the months preceding his resignation in
> 1974. No two-term president since polling began has fallen from such a height
> of popularity as Bush's (in the neighborhood of ninety percent, during the
> patriotic upswell following the 2001 attacks) to such a low (now in the
> midthirties). No president, including Harry Truman (whose ratings sometimes
> dipped below Nixonian levels), has experienced such a virtually unrelieved
> decline as Bush has since his high point. Apart from sharp but temporary
> upticks that followed the commencement of the Iraq war and the capture of
> Saddam Hussein, and a recovery during the weeks just before and after his
> re-election, the Bush trend has been a profile in fairly steady
> disillusionment.
> * * * *
> How does any president's reputation sink so low? The reasons are best
> understood as the reverse of those that produce presidential greatness. In
> almost every survey of historians dating back to the 1940s, three presidents
> have emerged as supreme successes: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and
> Franklin D. Roosevelt. These were the men who guided the nation through what
> historians consider its greatest crises: the founding era after the
> ratification of the Constitution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and
> Second World War. Presented with arduous, at times seemingly impossible
> circumstances, they rallied the nation, governed brilliantly and left the
> republic more secure than when they entered office.
> Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties -- Buchanan, Andrew
> Johnson, Hoover and now Bush -- have divided the nation, governed erratically
> and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to
> the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and
> military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public
> trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has
> not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed
> a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures -- an unswerving
> adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as
> heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities.
> Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of
> presidential performance.
> * * * *
> THE CREDIBILITY GAP
> 
> No previous president appears to have squandered the public's trust more than
> Bush has. In the 1840s, President James Polk gained a reputation for
> deviousness over his alleged manufacturing of the war with Mexico and his
> supposedly covert pro-slavery views. Abraham Lincoln, then an Illinois
> congressman, virtually labeled Polk a liar when he called him, from the floor
> of the House, "a bewildered, confounded and miserably perplexed man" and
> denounced the war as "from beginning to end, the sheerest deception." But the
> swift American victory in the war, Polk's decision to stick by his pledge to
> serve only one term and his sudden death shortly after leaving office spared
> him the ignominy over slavery that befell his successors in the 1850s. With
> more than two years to go in Bush's second term and no swift victory in sight,
> Bush's reputation will probably have no such reprieve.
> 
> The problems besetting Bush are of a more modern kind than Polk's, suited to
> the television age -- a crisis both in confidence and credibility. In 1965,
> Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam travails gave birth to the phrase "credibility gap,"
> meaning the distance between a president's professions and the public's
> perceptions of reality. It took more than two years for Johnson's disapproval
> rating in the Gallup Poll to reach fifty-two percent in March 1968 -- a figure
> Bush long ago surpassed, but that was sufficient to persuade the proud LBJ not
> to seek re-election. Yet recently, just short of three years after Bush
> buoyantly declared "mission accomplished" in Iraq, his disapproval ratings
> have been running considerably higher than Johnson's, at about sixty percent.
> More than half the country now considers Bush dishonest and untrustworthy, and
> a decisive plurality consider him less trustworthy than his predecessor, Bill
> Clinton -- a figure still attacked by conservative zealots as "Slick Willie."
> 
> Previous modern presidents, including Truman, Reagan and Clinton, managed to
> reverse plummeting ratings and regain the public's trust by shifting attention
> away from political and policy setbacks, and by overhauling the White House's
> inner circles. But Bush's publicly expressed view that he has made no major
> mistakes, coupled with what even the conservative commentator William F.
> Buckley Jr. calls his "high-flown pronouncements" about failed policies, seems
> to foreclose the first option. Upping the ante in the Middle East and bombing
> Iranian nuclear sites, a strategy reportedly favored by some in the White
> House, could distract the public and gain Bush immediate political capital in
> advance of the 2006 midterm elections -- but in the long term might severely
> worsen the already dire situation in Iraq, especially among Shiite Muslims
> linked to the Iranians. And given Bush's ardent attachment to loyal aides, no
> matter how discredited, a major personnel shake-up is improbable, short of
> indictments. Replacing Andrew Card with Joshua Bolten as chief of staff -- a
> move announced by the president in March in a tone that sounded more like
> defiance than contrition -- represents a rededication to current policies and
> personnel, not a serious change. (Card, an old Bush family retainer, was
> widely considered more moderate than most of the men around the president and
> had little involvement in policy-making.) The power of Vice President Dick
> Cheney, meanwhile, remains uncurbed. Were Cheney to announce he is stepping
> down due to health problems, normally a polite pretext for a political
> removal, one can be reasonably certain it would be because Cheney actually did
> have grave health problems.
> 
> * * * *
> 
> BUSH AT WAR
> 
> Until the twentieth century, American presidents managed foreign wars well --
> including those presidents who prosecuted unpopular wars. James Madison had no
> support from Federalist New England at the outset of the War of 1812, and the
> discontent grew amid mounting military setbacks in 1813. But Federalist
> political overreaching, combined with a reversal of America's military
> fortunes and the negotiation of a peace with Britain, made Madison something
> of a hero again and ushered in a brief so-called Era of Good Feelings in which
> his Jeffersonian Republican Party coalition ruled virtually unopposed. The
> Mexican War under Polk was even more unpopular, but its quick and victorious
> conclusion redounded to Polk's favor -- much as the rapid American victory in
> the Spanish-American War helped William McKinley overcome anti-imperialist
> dissent.
> 
> The twentieth century was crueler to wartime presidents. After winning
> re-election in 1916 with the slogan "He Kept Us Out of War," Woodrow Wilson
> oversaw American entry into the First World War. Yet while the doughboys
> returned home triumphant, Wilson's idealistic and politically disastrous
> campaign for American entry into the League of Nations presaged a resurgence
> of the opposition Republican Party along with a redoubling of American
> isolationism that lasted until Pearl Harbor.
> 
> Bush has more in common with post-1945 Democratic presidents Truman and
> Johnson, who both became bogged down in overseas military conflicts with no
> end, let alone victory, in sight. But Bush has become bogged down in a
> singularly crippling way. On September 10th, 2001, he held among the lowest
> ratings of any modern president for that point in a first term. (Only Gerald
> Ford, his popularity reeling after his pardon of Nixon, had comparable
> numbers.) The attacks the following day transformed Bush's presidency, giving
> him an extraordinary opportunity to achieve greatness. Some of the early signs
> were encouraging. Bush's simple, unflinching eloquence and his quick toppling
> of the Taliban government in Afghanistan rallied the nation. Yet even then,
> Bush wasted his chance by quickly choosing partisanship over leadership.
> 
> No other president -- Lincoln in the Civil War, FDR in World War II, John F.
> Kennedy at critical moments of the Cold War -- faced with such a monumental
> set of military and political circumstances failed to embrace the opposing
> political party to help wage a truly national struggle. But Bush shut out and
> even demonized the Democrats. Top military advisers and even members of the
> president's own Cabinet who expressed any reservations or criticisms of his
> policies -- including retired Marine Corps Gen. Anthony Zinni and former
> Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill -- suffered either dismissal, smear attacks
> from the president's supporters or investigations into their alleged breaches
> of national security. The wise men who counseled Bush's father, including
> James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, found their entreaties brusquely ignored by
> his son. When asked if he ever sought advice from the elder Bush, the
> president responded, "There is a higher Father that I appeal to."
> 
> All the while, Bush and the most powerful figures in the administration, Vice
> President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were planting the
> seeds for the crises to come by diverting the struggle against Al Qaeda toward
> an all-out effort to topple their pre-existing target, Saddam Hussein. In a
> deliberate political decision, the administration stampeded the Congress and a
> traumatized citizenry into the Iraq invasion on the basis of what has now been
> demonstrated to be tendentious and perhaps fabricated evidence of an imminent
> Iraqi threat to American security, one that the White House suggested included
> nuclear weapons. Instead of emphasizing any political, diplomatic or
> humanitarian aspects of a war on Iraq -- an appeal that would have sounded too
> "sensitive," as Cheney once sneered -- the administration built a "Bush
> Doctrine" of unprovoked, preventive warfare, based on speculative threats and
> embracing principles previously abjured by every previous generation of U.S.
> foreign policy-makers, even at the height of the Cold War. The president did
> so with premises founded, in the case of Iraq, on wishful thinking. He did so
> while proclaiming an expansive Wilsonian rhetoric of making the world safe for
> democracy -- yet discarding the multilateralism and systems of international
> law (including the Geneva Conventions) that emanated from Wilson's idealism.
> He did so while dismissing intelligence that an American invasion could spark
> a long and bloody civil war among Iraq's fierce religious and ethnic rivals,
> reports that have since proved true. And he did so after repeated warnings by
> military officials such as Gen. Eric Shinseki that pacifying postwar Iraq
> would require hundreds of thousands of American troops -- accurate estimates
> that Paul Wolfowitz and other Bush policy gurus ridiculed as "wildly off the
> mark."
> 
> When William F. Buckley, the man whom many credit as the founder of the modern
> conservative movement, writes categorically, as he did in February, that "one
> can't doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed," then something
> terrible has happened. Even as a brash young iconoclast, Buckley always took
> the long view. The Bush White House seems incapable of doing so, except
> insofar as a tiny trusted circle around the president constantly reassures him
> that he is a messianic liberator and profound freedom fighter, on a par with
> FDR and Lincoln, and that history will vindicate his every act and utterance.
> 
> * * * *
> 
> BUSH AT HOME
> 
> Bush came to office in 2001 pledging to govern as a "compassionate
> conservative," more moderate on domestic policy than the dominant right wing
> of his party. The pledge proved hollow, as Bush tacked immediately to the hard
> right. Previous presidents and their parties have suffered when their actions
> have belied their campaign promises. Lyndon Johnson is the most conspicuous
> recent example, having declared in his 1964 run against the hawkish Republican
> Barry Goldwater that "we are not about to send American boys nine or ten
> thousand miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for
> themselves." But no president has surpassed Bush in departing so thoroughly
> from his original campaign persona.
> 
> The heart of Bush's domestic policy has turned out to be nothing more than a
> series of massively regressive tax cuts -- a return, with a vengeance, to the
> discredited Reagan-era supply-side faith that Bush's father once ridiculed as
> "voodoo economics." Bush crowed in triumph in February 2004, "We cut taxes,
> which basically meant people had more money in their pocket." The claim is
> bogus for the majority of Americans, as are claims that tax cuts have led to
> impressive new private investment and job growth. While wiping out the solid
> Clinton-era federal surplus and raising federal deficits to staggering record
> levels, Bush's tax policies have necessitated hikes in federal fees, state and
> local taxes, and co-payment charges to needy veterans and families who rely on
> Medicaid, along with cuts in loan programs to small businesses and college
> students, and in a wide range of state services. The lion's share of benefits
> from the tax cuts has gone to the very richest Americans, while new business
> investment has increased at a historically sluggish rate since the peak of the
> last business cycle five years ago. Private-sector job growth since 2001 has
> been anemic compared to the Bush administration's original forecasts and is
> chiefly attributable not to the tax cuts but to increased federal spending,
> especially on defense. Real wages for middle-income Americans have been
> dropping since the end of 2003: Last year, on average, nominal wages grew by
> only 2.4 percent, a meager gain that was completely erased by an average
> inflation rate of 3.4 percent.
> 
> The monster deficits, caused by increased federal spending combined with the
> reduction of revenue resulting from the tax cuts, have also placed Bush's
> administration in a historic class of its own with respect to government
> borrowing. According to the Treasury Department, the forty-two presidents who
> held office between 1789 and 2000 borrowed a combined total of $1.01 trillion
> from foreign governments and financial institutions. But between 2001 and 2005
> alone, the Bush White House borrowed $1.05 trillion, more than all of the
> previous presidencies combined. Having inherited the largest federal surplus
> in American history in 2001, he has turned it into the largest deficit ever --
> with an even higher deficit, $423 billion, forecast for fiscal year 2006. Yet
> Bush -- sounding much like Herbert Hoover in 1930 predicting that "prosperity
> is just around the corner" -- insists that he will cut federal deficits in
> half by 2009, and that the best way to guarantee this would be to make
> permanent his tax cuts, which helped cause the deficit in the first place!
> 
> The rest of what remains of Bush's skimpy domestic agenda is either failed or
> failing -- a record unmatched since the presidency of Herbert Hoover. The No
> Child Left Behind educational-reform act has proved so unwieldy, draconian and
> poorly funded that several states -- including Utah, one of Bush's last
> remaining political strongholds -- have fought to opt out of it entirely.
> White House proposals for immigration reform and a guest-worker program have
> succeeded mainly in dividing pro-business Republicans (who want more low-wage
> immigrant workers) from paleo-conservatives fearful that hordes of
> Spanish-speaking newcomers will destroy American culture. The paleos' call for
> tougher anti-immigrant laws -- a return to the punitive spirit of exclusion
> that led to the notorious Immigration Act of 1924 that shut the door to
> immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe -- has in turn deeply alienated
> Hispanic voters from the Republican Party, badly undermining the GOP's hopes
> of using them to build a permanent national electoral majority. The recent
> pro-immigrant demonstrations, which drew millions of marchers nationwide,
> indicate how costly the Republican divide may prove.
> 
> The one noncorporate constituency to which Bush has consistently deferred is
> the Christian right, both in his selections for the federal bench and in his
> implications that he bases his policies on premillennialist, prophetic
> Christian doctrine. Previous presidents have regularly invoked the Almighty.
> McKinley is supposed to have fallen to his knees, seeking divine guidance
> about whether to take control of the Philippines in 1898, although the story
> may be apocryphal. But no president before Bush has allowed the press to
> disclose, through a close friend, his startling belief that he was ordained by
> God to lead the country. The White House's sectarian positions -- over
> stem-cell research, the teaching of pseudoscientific "intelligent design,"
> global population control, the Terri Schiavo spectacle and more -- have led
> some to conclude that Bush has promoted the transformation of the GOP into
> what former Republican strategist Kevin Phillips calls "the first religious
> party in U.S. history."
> 
> Bush's faith-based conception of his mission, which stands above and beyond
> reasoned inquiry, jibes well with his administration's pro-business dogma on
> global warming and other urgent environmental issues. While forcing federally
> funded agencies to remove from their Web sites scientific information about
> reproductive health and the effectiveness of condoms in combating HIV/AIDS,
> and while peremptorily overruling staff scientists at the Food and Drug
> Administration on making emergency contraception available over the counter,
> Bush officials have censored and suppressed research findings they don't like
> by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Fish and Wildlife Service and the
> Department of Agriculture. Far from being the conservative he said he was,
> Bush has blazed a radical new path as the first American president in history
> who is outwardly hostile to science -- dedicated, as a distinguished,
> bipartisan panel of educators and scientists (including forty-nine Nobel
> laureates) has declared, to "the distortion of scientific knowledge for
> partisan political ends."
> 
> The Bush White House's indifference to domestic problems and science alike
> culminated in the catastrophic responses to Hurricane Katrina. Scientists had
> long warned that global warming was intensifying hurricanes, but Bush ignored
> them -- much as he and his administration sloughed off warnings from the
> director of the National Hurricane Center before Katrina hit. Reorganized
> under the Department of Homeland Security, the once efficient Federal
> Emergency Management Agency turned out, under Bush, to have become a nest of
> cronyism and incompetence. During the months immediately after the storm, Bush
> traveled to New Orleans eight times to promise massive rebuilding aid from the
> federal government. On March 30th, however, Bush's Gulf Coast recovery
> coordinator admitted that it could take as long as twenty-five years for the
> city to recover.
> 
> Karl Rove has sometimes likened Bush to the imposing, no-nonsense President
> Andrew Jackson. Yet Jackson took measures to prevent those he called "the rich
> and powerful" from bending "the acts of government to their selfish purposes."
> Jackson also gained eternal renown by saving New Orleans from British invasion
> against terrible odds. Generations of Americans sang of Jackson's famous
> victory. In 1959, Johnny Horton's version of "The Battle of New Orleans" won
> the Grammy for best country & western performance. If anyone sings about
> George W. Bush and New Orleans, it will be a blues number.
> 
> * * * *
> 
> PRESIDENTIAL MISCONDUCT
> 
> Virtually every presidential administration dating back to George Washington's
> has faced charges of misconduct and threats of impeachment against the
> president or his civil officers. The alleged offenses have usually involved
> matters of personal misbehavior and corruption, notably the payoff scandals
> that plagued Cabinet officials who served presidents Harding and Ulysses S.
> Grant. But the charges have also included alleged usurpation of power by the
> president and serious criminal conduct that threatens constitutional
> government and the rule of law -- most notoriously, the charges that led to
> the impeachments of Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton, and to Richard Nixon's
> resignation.
> 
> Historians remain divided over the actual grievousness of many of these
> allegations and crimes. Scholars reasonably describe the graft and corruption
> around the Grant administration, for example, as gargantuan, including a
> kickback scandal that led to the resignation of Grant's secretary of war under
> the shadow of impeachment. Yet the scandals produced no indictments of Cabinet
> secretaries and only one of a White House aide, who was acquitted. By
> contrast, the most scandal-ridden administration in the modern era, apart from
> Nixon's, was Ronald Reagan's, now widely remembered through a haze of
> nostalgia as a paragon of virtue. A total of twenty-nine Reagan officials,
> including White House national security adviser Robert McFarlane and deputy
> chief of staff Michael Deaver, were convicted on charges stemming from the
> Iran-Contra affair, illegal lobbying and a looting scandal inside the
> Department of Housing and Urban Development. Three Cabinet officers -- HUD
> Secretary Samuel Pierce, Attorney General Edwin Meese and Secretary of Defense
> Caspar Weinberger -- left their posts under clouds of scandal. In contrast,
> not a single official in the Clinton administration was even indicted over his
> or her White House duties, despite repeated high-profile investigations and a
> successful, highly partisan impeachment drive.
> 
> The full report, of course, has yet to come on the Bush administration.
> Because Bush, unlike Reagan or Clinton, enjoys a fiercely partisan and loyal
> majority in Congress, his administration has been spared scrutiny. Yet that
> mighty advantage has not prevented the indictment of Vice President Dick
> Cheney's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on charges stemming from an
> alleged major security breach in the Valerie Plame matter. (The last White
> House official of comparable standing to be indicted while still in office was
> Grant's personal secretary, in 1875.) It has not headed off the unprecedented
> scandal involving Larry Franklin, a high-ranking Defense Department official,
> who has pleaded guilty to divulging classified information to a foreign power
> while working at the Pentagon -- a crime against national security. It has not
> forestalled the arrest and indictment of Bush's top federal procurement
> official, David Safavian, and the continuing investigations into Safavian's
> intrigues with the disgraced Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff, recently
> sentenced to nearly six years in prison -- investigations in which some
> prominent Republicans, including former Christian Coalition executive director
> Ralph Reed (and current GOP aspirant for lieutenant governor of Georgia) have
> already been implicated, and could well produce the largest congressional
> corruption scandal in American history. It has not dispelled the cloud of
> possible indictment that hangs over others of Bush's closest advisers.
> 
> History may ultimately hold Bush in the greatest contempt for expanding the
> powers of the presidency beyond the limits laid down by the U.S. Constitution.
> There has always been a tension over the constitutional roles of the three
> branches of the federal government. The Framers intended as much, as part of
> the system of checks and balances they expected would minimize tyranny. When
> Andrew Jackson took drastic measures against the nation's banking system, the
> Whig Senate censured him for conduct "dangerous to the liberties of the
> people." During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln's emergency decisions to
> suspend habeas corpus while Congress was out of session in 1861 and 1862 has
> led some Americans, to this day, to regard him as a despot. Richard Nixon's
> conduct of the war in Southeast Asia and his covert domestic-surveillance
> programs prompted Congress to pass new statutes regulating executive power.
> 
> By contrast, the Bush administration -- in seeking to restore what Cheney, a
> Nixon administration veteran, has called "the legitimate authority of the
> presidency" -- threatens to overturn the Framers' healthy tension in favor of
> presidential absolutism. Armed with legal findings by his attorney general
> (and personal lawyer) Alberto Gonzales, the Bush White House has declared that
> the president's powers as commander in chief in wartime are limitless. No
> previous wartime president has come close to making so grandiose a claim. More
> specifically, this administration has asserted that the president is perfectly
> free to violate federal laws on such matters as domestic surveillance and the
> torture of detainees. When Congress has passed legislation to limit those
> assertions, Bush has resorted to issuing constitutionally dubious "signing
> statements," which declare, by fiat, how he will interpret and execute the law
> in question, even when that interpretation flagrantly violates the will of
> Congress. Earlier presidents, including Jackson, raised hackles by offering
> their own view of the Constitution in order to justify vetoing congressional
> acts. Bush doesn't bother with that: He signs the legislation (eliminating any
> risk that Congress will overturn a veto), and then governs how he pleases --
> using the signing statements as if they were line-item vetoes. In those
> instances when Bush's violations of federal law have come to light, as over
> domestic surveillance, the White House has devised a novel solution: Stonewall
> any investigation into the violations and bid a compliant Congress simply to
> rewrite the laws.
> 
> Bush's alarmingly aberrant take on the Constitution is ironic. One need go
> back in the record less than a decade to find prominent Republicans railing
> against far more minor presidential legal infractions as precursors to all-out
> totalitarianism. "I will have no part in the creation of a constitutional
> double-standard to benefit the president," Sen. Bill Frist declared of Bill
> Clinton's efforts to conceal an illicit sexual liaison. "No man is above the
> law, and no man is below the law -- that's the principle that we all hold very
> dear in this country," Rep. Tom DeLay asserted. "The rule of law protects you
> and it protects me from the midnight fire on our roof or the 3 a.m. knock on
> our door," warned Rep. Henry Hyde, one of Clinton's chief accusers. In the
> face of Bush's more definitive dismissal of federal law, the silence from
> these quarters is deafening.
> 
> The president's defenders stoutly contend that war-time conditions fully
> justify Bush's actions. And as Lincoln showed during the Civil War, there may
> be times of military emergency where the executive believes it imperative to
> take immediate, highly irregular, even unconstitutional steps. "I felt that
> measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful," Lincoln wrote in
> 1864, "by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution,
> through the preservation of the nation." Bush seems to think that, since 9/11,
> he has been placed, by the grace of God, in the same kind of situation Lincoln
> faced. But Lincoln, under pressure of daily combat on American soil against
> fellow Americans, did not operate in secret, as Bush has. He did not claim, as
> Bush has, that his emergency actions were wholly regular and constitutional as
> well as necessary; Lincoln sought and received Congressional authorization for
> his suspension of habeas corpus in 1863. Nor did Lincoln act under the
> amorphous cover of a "war on terror" -- a war against a tactic, not a specific
> nation or political entity, which could last as long as any president deems
> the tactic a threat to national security. Lincoln's exceptional measures were
> intended to survive only as long as the Confederacy was in rebellion. Bush's
> could be extended indefinitely, as the president sees fit, permanently
> endangering rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution to the
> citizenry.
> 
> * * * *
> 
> Much as Bush still enjoys support from those who believe he can do no wrong,
> he now suffers opposition from liberals who believe he can do no right. Many
> of these liberals are in the awkward position of having supported Bush in the
> past, while offering little coherent as an alternative to Bush's policies now.
> Yet it is difficult to see how this will benefit Bush's reputation in history.
> 
> The president came to office calling himself "a uniter, not a divider" and
> promising to soften the acrimonious tone in Washington. He has had two
> enormous opportunities to fulfill those pledges: first, in the noisy aftermath
> of his controversial election in 2000, and, even more, after the attacks of
> September 11th, when the nation pulled behind him as it has supported no other
> president in living memory. Yet under both sets of historically unprecedented
> circumstances, Bush has chosen to act in ways that have left the country less
> united and more divided, less conciliatory and more acrimonious -- much like
> James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Herbert Hoover before him. And, like those
> three predecessors, Bush has done so in the service of a rigid ideology that
> permits no deviation and refuses to adjust to changing realities. Buchanan
> failed the test of Southern secession, Johnson failed in the face of
> Reconstruction, and Hoover failed in the face of the Great Depression. Bush
> has failed to confront his own failures in both domestic and international
> affairs, above all in his ill-conceived responses to radical Islamic
> terrorism. Having confused steely resolve with what Ralph Waldo Emerson called
> "a foolish consistency . . . adored by little statesmen," Bush has become
> entangled in tragedies of his own making, compounding those visited upon the
> country by outside forces.
> 
> No historian can responsibly predict the future with absolute certainty. There
> are too many imponderables still to come in the two and a half years left in
> Bush's presidency to know exactly how it will look in 2009, let alone in 2059.
> There have been presidents -- Harry Truman was one -- who have left office in
> seeming disgrace, only to rebound in the estimates of later scholars. But so
> far the facts are not shaping up propitiously for George W. Bush. He still
> does his best to deny it. Having waved away the lessons of history in the
> making of his decisions, the present-minded Bush doesn't seem to be concerned
> about his place in history. "History. We won't know," he told the journalist
> Bob Woodward in 2003. "We'll all be dead."
> 
> Another president once explained that the judgments of history cannot be
> defied or dismissed, even by a president. "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape
> history," said Abraham Lincoln. "We of this Congress and this administration,
> will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or
> insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which
> we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation."
> 
> SEAN WILENTZ
> 


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