| The Ottawa Citizen
Wednesday, October 01, 2008, By Dan Gardner. ©The Ottawa Citizen. |
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Worst. President. Ever. So how 'bout that George W. Bush? In the 2000 election, the big issue was how to spend the $4.6-trillion surplus the U.S. government would rack up over the next 10 years. In the 2008 election, the big issue is how to keep Chinese bankers from foreclosing on the United States and selling the White House at auction. The latest Gallup poll has Bush's approval rating falling to a record low of 27 per cent, which is surprising only when one realizes it means one in four Americans actually thinks Bush is doing an acceptable job. Of course, one in four Americans also believes the earth is visited by extraterrestrials so we really shouldn't expect too much from that bottom quartile. Hanging on to the cliff's edge with our fingernails, it's amusing to think that if we plummet into the abyss it will be the life of the Bush presidency that will flash before our eyes. He seemed a harmless little man back in 2000. He called himself a "compassionate conservative." He liked to talk about education. He said his foreign policy would be "humble." He called himself "a uniter, not a divider." After taking office, Bush's approval ratings were middling. He got his tax cut passed and immediately went on vacation. He was mediocre, not dangerously incompetent. Those were golden days. Then came the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and Bush's reputation soared like Superman. Many pundits compared him to Winston Churchill. Others saw Abraham Lincoln. (The same pundits would later claim to have seen "an American Margaret Thatcher" in Sarah Palin. One suspects they also believe the earth is visited by extraterrestrials.)
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Fast forward a few years -- Osama bin Laden gets away, government goes into deficit, there are no Iraqi WMDs, "Mission Accomplished" turns into "Mission Impossible" -- and many people asked whether George W. is among the worst presidents in modern American history. Conservatives said the critics had "Bush derangement syndrome." Then New Orleans drowned and the president congratulated the unqualified hack -- "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva a job" -- who let it happen. Investigations steadily revealed the administration was rife with cronyism, corruption and incompetence. (Even jobs in Iraq's Coalition Provisional Authority were given out on the basis of connections and dogma. "A 24-year-old who had never worked in finance -- but had applied for a White House job -- was sent to reopen Baghdad's stock exchange," wrote the Washington Post's Rajiv Chandrasekaran. "The daughter of a prominent neoconservative commentator and a recent graduate from an evangelical university for home-schooled children were tapped to manage Iraq's $13 billion budget, even though they didn't have a background in accounting. ... Two people who sought jobs with the U.S. occupation authority said they were even asked their views on Roe v. Wade.") Around the same time, we learned that the president who proclaimed "every man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value" had authorized systematic torture. America's prestige ebbed further. Bush competed with Kim Jong-il as the planet's most loathed human. In the debate about the president, the stakes were raised: "Is he among the worst in modern American history?" gave way to "Is he the worst ever?"
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But then came the surge. Iraq calmed down. It only took a trillion dollars and several hundred thousand dead to modestly reduce a fiasco entirely created by the president, but, oddly, this success did not revive Bush's approval rating. Conservatives blamed media bias. Afghanistan went south. Osama bin Laden danced a jig. Through it all, conservatives claimed Bush at least deserved credit for a strong economy but it was apparent all along -- as it is unmistakable now -- that the "Bush boom" was as solid as a New Orleans levee. A blatant housing bubble was allowed to inflate, homeowners turned equity into new trucks and giant screen TVs, and American savings rates went negative for the first time since the Great Depression. Manic consumer spending put froth on the economy, and billions in the pockets of Wall Street and its friends, but Ponzi schemes always end badly. And so now we hang on to the cliff by our fingernails as the man whose incompetence put us here runs around looking for a rope. Is Bush the worst president ever? At this point, it's time to drop the question mark and adopt the inimitable style of Comic Book Guy: Worst. President. Ever. The only question worth debating is whether Bush will also be the last. Watch what happens on Pennsylvania Avenue. If a guy with a pot belly and a megaphone stands up in the back of a pickup truck and asks for opening bids -- "Do I have 10,000 yuan? 10,000 yuan? I have 10,000! Do I have 15,000 yuan?" -- we'll know the answer. You can contact Dan Gardner at the Ottawa Citizen. |
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Copyright © 2005 Dan Gardner |