Clean Lines, No Capes

He may not go down in history as the worst. But I’d be willing to bet he’ll go down as one of the worst. As George W. Bush held his final news conference today, various news organizations have begun looking back over the last 8 years and, well, I think Joe Gandelman over at The Moderate Voice put it best:

let’s just say that when they made their list of pluses and minuses they ended an extra page for the minuses . . .

The good news for George Bush: they are not (yet) calling him the worst President ever. The bad news: its clear he is considered one of the most unsuccessful Presidents in recent times and perhaps in history — and historians’ views over the past year have largely coincided with those emerging assessments.

Joe has already rounded up the following, but for your reading pleasure -

The Associated Press:

WASHINGTON—Wars. Recession. Bailouts. Debt. Gloom.

The unvarnished review of George W. Bush’s presidency reveals a portrait of America he never would have imagined.

Bush came into office promising limited government and humble foreign policy; he exits with his imprint on startling free-market intervention and nation-building wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He was the president who pledged not to pass on big problems. Instead, he leaves a pile for Barack Obama.

Read it in full, as there’s some good analysis in there, and not all is negative. But the telling bits come early:

And it was one of Bush’s heroes, Ronald Reagan, who crystallized the way modern presidents are judged: Are people better off than they were when the president took office?

Based on that standard, the Bush report card is mixed at best. It is abysmal at worst.

The Washington Post focuses more on his economic legacy, and don’t find much. The conclusion there seems to be not to expect any kindness from historians:

President Bush has presided over the weakest eight-year span for the U.S. economy in decades, according to an analysis of key data, and economists across the ideological spectrum increasingly view his two terms as a time of little progress on the nation’s thorniest fiscal challenges.

The number of jobs in the nation increased by about 2 percent during Bush’s tenure, the most tepid growth over any eight-year span since data collection began seven decades ago. Gross domestic product, a broad measure of economic output, grew at the slowest pace for a period of that length since the Truman administration. And Americans’ incomes grew more slowly than in any presidency since the 1960s, other than that of Bush’s father.

Bush and his aides are quick to point out that they oversaw 52 straight months of job growth in the middle of this decade, and that the economy expanded at a steady clip from 2003 to 2007. But economists, including some former advisers to Bush, say it increasingly looks as if the nation’s economic expansion was driven to a large degree by the interrelated booms in the housing market, consumer spending and financial markets. Those booms, which the Bush administration encouraged with the idea of an “ownership society,” have proved unsustainable.

The L.A. Times notes that George W. Bush’s legacy will be judged in the context of his father’s:

As George W. Bush prepares to return to Texas, historians will be judging his legacy in the context of his father’s single term as president.

“The likelihood is that the father will be looked upon as a steadier hand and better prepared for the job,” said Bruce Buchanan, a professor of government at the University of Texas who specializes in the presidency.

Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University, calls the senior Bush “dramatically more accomplished” in both foreign and domestic policy than his son. Still, he said, “They are in fact going to be doing chin-ups on the bottom tier of presidents in modern history.”

Still, the Bush family is down, but may not be out. As the LA Times notes:

George H.W. Bush recently suggested publicly that Jeb Bush would make a good president, but his son opted out of running for an open Senate seat last week and appears to be shuttering his political ambitions altogether.

“Right now is probably a bad time because we’ve had enough Bushes in there,” the elder president acknowledged during the earlier “Fox News Sunday” interview.

Still, there’s always Jeb’s son George Prescott Bush, 32, viewed by his family as a potential candidate for political office in the years to come.

To which I can only say – Can this country really survive a third Bush Presidency?

This entry was posted on Monday, January 12th, 2009 at 11:13 am and is filed under Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.