I like history quite a bit. I study it with some vigor and have had the privilege to live through almost 23 years of it. The value of history for me, and I suppose others, is that it allows for one to look at current travesties and say, this too will pass.
It may well be that President Bush is a kind, generous man who loves his family, friends and country. This is all good and well. I love my mom too.
It is also said the president has a common touch – that average Americans like him because he is so average. That’s fine, but I figure if I have to be ruled by some someone, I would hope he is at least further along the right end of the bell curve than Bush.
In sum, I am afraid to write, President Bush is a basement dweller in the annals of White House residents. Perhaps it is the place itself. Our noblest chief, Gen. Washington, never lived there. Uniquely, perhaps, our current chief ranks terribly in comparison to nearly every other president.
Comparing him to the men traditionally described as failures, Ulysses S. Grant and Warren G. Harding, he has the misfortune of being unable to match Grant’s out-of-the-White House accomplishments – being an excellent general and writing excellent memoirs (Bush’s memoirs will undoubtably be a cross between a Neo-conservative policy paper and a Jack Chick tract). Compared with Harding, perhaps the one traditionally considered the worst president of all, one sees more analogies. Both men, it seems, were personally honest, as well as distinct second-raters – although Harding never drove any of his businesses into the ground. But Harding’s greatest achievement was the fact that, unlike Bush, his cabinet was filled to the brim with excellent advisors who actually knew what they were talking about.
Well perhaps Bush is, as he has said, a “war president” and should be judged on that level. We’ve had a fair amount of those. Compared to the likes of Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt II and Johnson, he is a shallow, bewildered man; tragically out of depth in our current situation. Though I may not care for the men I have mentioned above, I think Wilson, in the end, is a worse president than Bush. I cannot deny that these war presidents have all had a force of character, panache, if you will, that Bush himself never can hope to have.
What we are left with is a man who, in five years he has been in office, has very little to show in accomplishments, and a near felonious record of failure. Certainly the atrocities of Sept. 11 were not his fault, and his first eight months in office weren’t too bad, all after represents a man horribly out of his depth and filled to the brim with bad advice.
Yet, somehow, he has been twice elected over men, though neither remotely close to the flower of the desiccated corpse of the Democratic party, more able than he. Perhaps there is something I have missed, but I don’t think so. He has in him the appeal of all that is middling in America – megachurches, reality television, theme restaurants and James Frey. In short, all that is palpably fake, manufactured and common in our society. Perhaps this is how this man, a poltroon and an ass, managed to attain his position. He was certainly not the first, but he has truly grasped the gross stupidity of popular culture. He is its finest representative.
How then will history judge Bush? I believe he will have his court historians, those who praise him for his vision, but in the long run he will be seen as the man who presided over the beginning of the end of American empire, as well as the further collapse of the American dream.
He has done us all one singular service, though. To help us all relearn the adage of never sending a second-rate man on a first-rate job.
 
Ryan is a history senior. Contact him
at [email protected]