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October 17, 2005

Rush to Judgement

Via Alterman I learn that a plurality of Americans think that President Bush's presidency will be judged a failure by history. Alterman's reaction? "You couldn’t have figured this out, say, last November?" Naturally, Alterman is convinced that the Bush presidency's failure is so plainly self-evident that it may as well already be recorded as an historical fact. Readers will be unsurprised to learn, however, that I think it's quite clear Alterman is jumping the gun by at least a decade.

How do we judge presidents? Who were successes, and who were failures? After Washington, you can find people who will point to all other presidencies as bad without looking very hard. Hard-edged libertarians despise Abraham Lincoln's actions in response to secession. Few Republicans think very much of FDR's varied attempts to pull America out of the Great Depression. Despite the general outpouring of love for President Reagan after his death last spring, the average Democrat is unlikely to look back fondly on his presidency and declare it a great success. Granted, historians try to use different criteria in adjudging a presidency, but bias will inevitably creep into all such judgements because it is difficult to apply objective criteria to 43 men's actions in response to vastly varied circumstances. These judgements are all the more difficult when those making the judgements remember the time in question; see the fond reminisces of the Kennedy presidency for evidence of this. Under JFK America saw the Bay of Pigs disaster, the erection of the Berlin Wall, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Hardly the hallmarks of a massively successful presidency. Yet even now, 42 years after his death, Kennedy is frequently remembered as a great or near-great president, a ranking completely out of order with his presidency. (See here for the Federalist Society/Wall Street Journal rankings, where Kennedy still comes in as Above Average.)Kennedy has faded as memories of his personal charisma fade, but it will likely be another half-century before any real consensus on his presidency can coalesce. It is therefore far from likely that anyone could realistically expect anyone right now to assess the Bush presidency with any hope of accuracy. Things which appear important now may turn out to be irrelevant in the grand scheme, while issues currently ignored may turn out to be far more important than we now realize. We need look no further than the Clinton presidency to realize that an issue that was on few radar screens in the 1990s, Islamofascism, will now be an important yardstick against which President Clinton will be measured (although it would be improper to mark him down too harshly for it, as it is virtually inconceivable that any president would have reacted with adquate measures against the growing threat we faced at that time).

When one considers what is likely to be seen as the defining issue of the Bush presidency, the war in Iraq, it should be clear to even the most partisan observer that there is no way to know right now how history will view the Bush presidency. If, in twenty years, Iraq and Afghanistan are reasonably peaceful and still maintain representative governments, the Bush presidency is going to look pretty good. If not, the Bush presidency will look pretty bad regardless of what happens with the price of oil or whether or not the economy is going gangbusters. Don't believe me? You don't have to: just look at history. There is probably one U.S. President who is notorious for economics during his presidency, and that's Herbert Hoover, who got to take the blame for the Depression (and he did some things to deserve it). Yet his successor, the aforementioned Franklin Delano Roosevelt, presided over eight years of dismal economic news far worse than what happened under Hoover, and FDR is generally ranked as a great president, thanks to his performance during the Second World War. It's hard for us to imagine today, with the slogan 'It's the economy, stupid' still resonating, to believe, but presidencies are rarely rated based on the strength of the economy. In the rear view mirror, such issues are seen as far less important, possibly (although probably not) because the ability of the president to materially effect the economy is nowhere near as great as is assumed by the media.

Mr. Alterman has every right to try and declare the Bush presidency a failure. It is good for Alterman politically, and it may help to propel his party back into power. But I suspect Alterman is smart enough to realize that the real judgment of the Bush administration will have to wait a few decades before we can look back on it with any accuracy.