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There are quite a lot of former presidents at the starting gate for the "worst president in history race": let's see, there are Pierce and Buchanan, Polk and Andrew Johnson, Coolidge and Harding, even Nixon (for general creepiness). But I would have to give George W. Bush poll position in this event. Why? In today's Washington Post, Douglas Brinkley compares Bush to Herbert Hoover. I would say that this was exactly wrong. Bush is the "anti-Hoover". Hoover failed, this is true and Bush is failing too, but that is about the only thing that unites them. Maybe before we go on, you might like to have a look at Hoover's biography to refresh your memory. A cursory reading will quickly reveal a brilliant student, a self-made man, a distinguished humanitarian, who criticized, for aiding communism when organizing famine relief to revolutionary Russia in 1921, replied "Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!". Doesn't sound like our boy Dubya, does it? The point is that Herbert Hoover was an exceptionally fine man, someone who people voted for because they wanted an exceptionally fine man in the White House, not "somebody they could drink a beer with". Fine a man as Hoover was he was overwhelmed by the Great Depression, he applied classic remedies to a new situation and failed miserably and he was ridiculed and rejected for failing. "Democracy is a harsh employer", he was heard to say. His last word on the Great Depression might have been when he said, "The only trouble with capitalism is capitalists - they are too damn greedy." In fact with Bush nobody has a right to be disappointed, nobody 'misunderestimated' him, what we saw was what we got. A mediocrity, who all his life had failed at everything he ever did and when he didn't fail outright, his chestnuts were pulled out of the fire by his father or by his father's friends... and to top it off he was/is an alcoholic. All of this was public record. He was a classic third rater. The real question is how somebody so lacking in merit was considered qualified for the highest office in a country of 300M people, with the highest percentage of university graduates in the world? How was he selected? How did they have the nerve, the chutzpah to brazenly foist off such defective goods on the public...? But then comes the question that is the most painful one, one that puts modern American democracy itself in doubt: why did anyone vote for him? And then even more painfully, why did they reelect him? I think it's a waste of time to handicap Dubya in a race with Coolidge and Harding, Pierce and Polk. What is beyond question is that the US citizens who elected him are far and away the "worst voters" in US history. In two years, Bush will have gone. If he were the real problem, it would end there. However, the same selection process will be in place and the same voters will be waiting to choose again and that is what we and the whole world will have to live with. DS
