The parallels between this year and 1998 continue to be way too eerie. Replace "historians" with George Mason's own in-house conservatives, replace Bush with Clinton, and you could've written this story in 1998.

Forget about best/worst. Is Bush significant? Hard to argue that he's not one of only 3 truly significant Presidents of the last century.

Clinton's presidency was the very definition of insignificance--he'll be remembered for impeachment and for doing nothing about terrorism.

Ronald Reagan was attacked for mismanaging the nation's finances, but he won the Cold War and his aggressive tax cuts eventually ignited the economy.

We didn't see the end of the Cold War until the Soviet Union actually imploded in 1991. Reagan was instrumental in killing the Soviet Union; however, the point is that you don't see results until later.

All in all, this is a load of crap. BDS.

History professor Robert McElvaine of Milsap College is just an objective academic (yeah right!) Just take a peek at his web site:
http://home.millsaps.edu/mcelvrs/

For his personal interests, he links to Democrats.org and JohnKerry.com.

The guy is a hack. Not only that, he is a Mets fan.

Below is one of the many pearls of wisdom from the history professor, Robert McElvaine, who is quoted in the article. This is from his web page regarding his 2005 visit to South Korea:

On the bus en route to the DMZ, I read in the International Herald-Tribune that it has just been revealed that North Korean leader Kim Jil-il had sent a message to George W. Bush in 2002 offering to stop North Korea’s nuclear program in exchange for assurances that the United States would recognize North Korea’s sovereignty. The State Department was interested in pursuing the opening, but Bush, with his characteristic pseudo-macho stupidity, brushed it aside. Has any president ever made more momentous mistakes?

Professor McElvaine is an idiot.

Anyone who believes Kim Jong-freakin'-Il should be trusted more than the President deserves the obscurity you'll get by teaching at Milsap College (I've never heard of it either).

I am not a big fan of President Bush, although I don't consider myself a kneejerk basher, but there is no way to evaluate Bush until we have some historical perspective.

If Iraq truly self-destructs, and Bush's mistakes causes successors to not take the needed steps to defeat Islamic terrorism, then Bush will turn out to be terrible. If Iraq stabilizes, successors continue the war, and Iran's nuclear ambitions are curtailed, he'll be brilliant.

Likewise, Lincoln's entire legacy depended on whether Sherman took Atlanta before the 1864 election. History can be cruel and fickle at times.

I think at worst, Bush will be seen as having squandered a key time to do better, but not too terrible. LBJ was a far worse blunderer when it came to his war, and Carter was a fiasco.

Chris:

Iraq doesn't matter that much. During the Cold War our focus was Russia and it's a mess, but because everything else -- our economy, Poland, etc. -- is doing rather well it was a success. Likewise the Civil War was a disaster for blacks and Georgia was economically retarded for a century after the war, but we count the Civil War as a win. So long as the rest of the Middle East keeps trending our way some chaos in a state where Sunni are losing power to the majority Shi'a won't matter much in the history books.

American presidents are never really terrible but they are never really great either. Bush is bad but we can recover. Another guy like Bush would really be pushing our luck.

I just don't think presidents are as important as people seem to think. And History is fickle. Lincoln was not a proponent of emancipation - it was convienient for him. Reagan was in office when the USSR fell - how much he had to do with it is grossly over represented. But now he and Lincoln are great heros.

If we judge just on incidents of grotesque incompetance surely Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs wins for the 20th century, but he is considered great.

Clinton balanced the budget but screwed his secretary so for some reason thats bad. Bush Sr. won the only war the US has fought and won since WWII ( except maybe Bosnia) and the US didn't even pay for it. This fiscal marvel is considered not up to par by republicans who now spend like Lotto winners. If you are going to be a republican you better keep up with the fashion.

Carter is the only one who history treats justly. He is considered to be and actually was irrelevant. LBJ was odd. All the presidents since him have had a operatic quality that is awful. TV makes them melodramatic and none of them looked good and smart at the same time.

There have been just five presidents who have mattered enough that they could be called great--Washington, Lincoln, FDR, Reagan, and Bush.

"... but few have come up so short, on so many counts, as Bush has." How about Johnson, and Carter, just to name two?
"On the bus en route to the DMZ, ... The State Department was interested in pursuing the opening, but Bush, with his characteristic pseudo-macho stupidity, brushed it aside." Yeah, everybody knows there was a Carter negotiated deal in the 90's that the US was to give Kim two nuclear reactors for civilian energy generation, and Kim was to stop his military nuclear weapons development. The US, Japan and S. Korea have started building the reactors, but Kim has never stopped his weapons. For the fool to claim that the whole deal collapsed because of Bush's pseudo-macho stupidity was willfully blind and idiotically stupid.

Actually I think Presidents shouldn't be heros in the US. The UK needs great leaders and they get them. The US has never had leaders of that calibre. But it doesn't need them. US presidents don't stand up to scrutiny. Who cares. Its a great country anyway.

oj: I think Lincoln was great, but did he really matter? The North was always going to win the Civil War. Reconstruction was a catastrophic mistake that caused another century's worth of social & economic problems. Had it not been for Booth, Lincoln would quite possibly have changed that and truly changed history, but lots of men would have won the war & then harshly punished the South...

b:

Sure, the War was a mistake, but he matters because he fought it.

Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher are the only decent political leaders the Brits have produced since the 19th century.

oj: By the late 1850's war was inevitable. Reconstruction as implemented was not, although it was extremely likely due to the religious overtones of the conflict. Lincoln may have been the indispensible man for avoiding the bitterness and recriminations that followed...

b:

No it wasn't. No Democrat would have fought it.

b

I agree, and will go further. LIncoln was not great. He didn't get the chance. The Civil War was not a glorious Ken Burns reckoning of the american soul, it was really terrible and may not have been necessary. After it was over, the rich in the south, who were supposed to be the bad guys were able to gain something back while the poor and middle class collapsed.

Not particularly wonderful Ken.

Sure it was. The first time an abolitionist won the Presidency (i.e., not a Democrat, I grant you), secession would have started. Whether that happened in 1860, 1864, 1868, etc., wouldn't have changed the overall picture.

No abolitionist could win.

Lincoln is great whether or not the war was good, just as FDR is great though a terrible president.

OJ, thanks for posting the article. Very strange take on Reagan's role in "winning" the cold war and "igniting the economy". Including Reagan and Bush with FDR, Washington and Lincoln is inane.

Reagan was, foremost, an actor. And everyone since has tried the same role.

FDR is great though a terrible president? What does that mean?

Historical point taken. I have flu and can't fight as hard tonight.

No. Thinking about it, yes you are right in the way you put it. The US as it is presently constituted is impossible without the Civil War. What was I thinking? But I am of the rare group who think that a divided US might not have been so bad. Two countries may easily have been better than one. I am not a big believer in THE STATE as such and do not tow the line with OJ on matters of soverienty.

( Terrible secret: OJ will, if pressed, back the fascists in a discussion of the Spanish Civil War. I would definitely go with the anarchists before the communist duplicity. )

Smaller IS often better. But that is very tangentail and probably irrelevant. You are right about the CW.

Bill:

Reagan gave Volcker full support to weed out inflation, broke the Labor movement in the PATCO strike, and began the process of reducing taxes. The economy has grown every year since. All that was required to win the Cold War was to point out that Communism/Socialism had in fact failed and could never succeed, but only Reagan among 20th century political leaders did so.

One of the greatst presidents of all time, worthty of comparison with James Knoz Polk.

One of the greatst presidents of all time, worthty of comparison with James Knox Polk.

History will be the best judge. People wanted to canonize JFK fifteen years after his death, but now we can look at the bigger picture.

Of course, if we nuke Iran, the equations would change.

Far too lazy to Google the actual data, but as an additional perspective I recall the suite of Presidential popularity polls of Clinton & Reagan (the most recent two-termers) also plummeting at about this time. The hype and hope of Americans for a truly fresh start meets the messy reality of setback, compromise, and slow-going. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

ex:

Pressed? Franco was the best European leader of the 20th Century.

Bill:

No, history is a terrible judge.

Oj, increase in GDP is not the best marker for a good economy.

"Broke the labor movement"? Arguable, I suppose, but not related to an improved economy.

Another way to look at what you said about the collapse of the Soviet Union was that Reagan was in the right place at the right time.

But for some reason, conservatives can't get enough Reagan. Were you awake when he was in office?

Ok, you are a big fan of Franco.

No wonder I find it difficult to understand your perspective.

Bill:

Actually, GDP per capita and Household Net Worth are the best markers, but choose any you like.

Breaking the unions was as vital to controlling inflation as Volcker's hikes.

No, the right time had existed for sixty years--Reagan was the right man to point out what was obvious to all but the intellectual classes.

Reagan's failure to challenge the New Deal/Great Society and his repeated tax hikes keep him from being a great president in fact, but he's a great one in history.

And you think Spain should have gone Stalinist, so I have no trouble understanding you.

See, OJ, you think that Spain going communist in the 1930's would have been the same as them going Stalinist (I suppose because of economic policy). But the things that made Stalin, well, Stalin, had very little to do with his economic policies. As far as totalitarian rule and loss of individual rights, Franco was Stalin.

And median family income is my prefered marker - and, I'm not a big fan of Clinton, so you can save your breath.

In 2004, George Mason University polled 415 presidential historians and found 80 per cent considered Bush's first term a failure. More than half considered it the worst presidency since the Great Depression. More than a third called it the worst in 100 years. Eleven per cent said it was the worst ever.

I can't even conceive of a better demonstration of this president's greatness than having the academy overwhelmingly tell us he sucks.

Matt, because intellectuals are not to be trusted?

Bill:

Bingo, the belief in a good communism is your tell.

Franco wasn't a totalitarian, he was an authoritarian who saved Spain from totalitarianism and left it in a refurbished state that allowed a painless transition to democracy.

And communism is evil because? It promotes atheism? It gets between you and the new H2? It provides the labor (in China) for the robust global economy you keep talking about?

Franco was great for Spain, minus the few hundred thousand Spaniards he executed, and who therefore didn't enter the new glorious democratic era (nearly a half-century after Franco started ruling and 10 years after he died).

See Bill, sometimes OJ makes a lot of sense and other times he is a full-on Bull Goose Loony. Franco - what a hero! If they don't go to church Sundays they shall die! That Franco.

And OJ,
your whole Kirkpatrick, authoritarian/ totalitarian justification isn't going to work. That thinking is behind most of the international problems we have to day. We have recongnized and admitted it as a deep insult to undeveloped nations. And because we go on ignoring it we make stupid mistakes like Iraq and the forthcoming Iran debacle.

The Cold War is over. We fought it and won. Now can we please admit that we made some mistakes and work from reality instead of assuming that history is chorus of angels singing our praises. Quick before GW decides God told him to nuke Tehran.

No. Franco was a word which I probably can't use on a conservative blog.

Bill:

And communism is evil because? risks pushing you over the edge into self-parody.

However, had the Tsar killed 100,000 he'd have saved 100 million.

please post a citation documenting the "hundreds of thousands" franco had put to death.

how many millions would a communist regime have murdered ? or don't the crimes of the left count in your world ?

Why was Franco so great? Thats what I think he's saying OJ. He was not Mao but then again he wasn't Churchill iether. He was your run of the mill murderous slob. Thats all. Europe is famous for producing such people as you know.

ex:

The Cold War is over and the beseiged nation's that came out of it best are those that had authoritarian regimes triumph over totalitarian--Chile, Spain, etc.

ex:

No, Franco saved Spain from both Stalin on the Lerft and Hitler on the Right and in doing the latter kept Hitler from controlling Gibraltar and the Med. He rebuilt the social institutions of Spain and crushed the Left so it had a thriving economy and a firm basis for democracy.

Churchill's legacy pales in comparison.

What am I doing? I'm not actually going to argue with folks who still approve of communism in the 21st century.