I didn’t know we’d be returning to this issue. But Mark Schmitt returns to the question Yglesias and I have been knocking around — is there a case that President Bush is the worst president ever?
Not to keep you waiting in suspence too long, but Mark is clearly in the ‘yes’ camp. And while I think I agree with Mark on that general judgment (as well as the issue of Bush’s treatment of the career civil service), I agree with him even more on the issue of Ronald Reagan.
Matt says that President Bush is actually slightly better than Ronald Reagan, as presidents go. But having lived through the Reagan presidency, even at a relatively young age, I just can’t come close to seeing that. Like Schmitt, I don’t mean to get nostalgic about the gipper. But for all my disagreements with various of his policies, Reagan was a far better president than George W. Bush on almost every measure I can think of.
As someone whose politics are on the center-left, I think he was better simply because he wasn’t nearly as conservative as President Bush. But that’s obviously a fairly situational sort of judgment.
More aptly, Mark says this …
Bush âsomewhat better than Ronald Reaganâ? I donât think so. I have a certain – limited – respect for Reagan, some of it developed after his presidency. As a model for one kind of presidency – the person of a few strong principles who leaves implementation to others – he had an admirable sense of his own strengths and limits. His 1981 budget cuts were not devastating and while he cut taxes that year, he also increased them, massively, when things got tight in 1982 and then later moved the Tax Reform Act of 1986. He invaded countries, but manageable, symbolic ones. My defense of Reagan is limited – he was not a president I would vote for – but on the narrow question of whether he was worse than Bush 43, I cannot see the case for it.
Let me expand on the issue of tax cuts followed by tax increases because I think it gets us toward something like a general theory of presidential quality.
On key points during his presidency, Ronald Reagan was capable of shifting gears. Again, not to idealize the man. But he was capable of seeing that outcomes hadn’t matched up to expectations and changing policy or, in other cases, capable of seeing that basic facts had changed and that policies and even something approaching world-views must change accordingly.
Mark has noted the issue of fiscal policy. I would add the rapprochement with Soviet reformers in his second term.
As a side note, I think it’s worth noting that there’s a vast ocean of revisionism that conservatives indulge in when they claim that the denouement of Soviet power, as it came to pass in the 1980s, was somehow part of the plan in their push for anti-Soviet confrontation in the 1970s and 1980s.
Not at all.
The US military build-ups played a role, yes. But the vision of 1970s neo-conservatives was altogether more grim and pessimistic than the retrospective view. The plan was not to force the Soviet machine into overdrive and watch it peacefully breakdown. The issue was, as neoconservative godfather Norman Podhoretz put it as late as 1980, whether we could avoid the “finlandization of America, the political and economic subordination of the United States to superior Soviet power.”
What did happen was the last thing they imagined. Thus, Reagan’s shift was a very big one.
In any case, that is another matter entirely. So, back to Mr. Reagan and presidential quality.
Reagan had the ability, simply, to change his mind. You might say it’s the ability to allow the facts to overcome your mind or as our secular saint, President Lincoln, put it, far more eloquently, the ability to ‘disenthrall ourselves.’
And that is an ability the current occupant of the White House entirely lacks — a fact which is on display now as he again crosses the country arguing that black is white and up is down.
President Bush represents something different from the normal sloshing back and forth between liberalism and conservatism. He’s a radical. He’s set on a destructive course, laced with corruption and fed by extremism. And he mistakenly believes that stubborness and ignorance constitute a virtue he calls ‘leadership’.
I don’t think there’s much question that President Bush is the most conservative president in modern American history. But the issue is not his conservatism; it’s his radicalism and destructiveness, his willingness to wreck the state. ‘Worst ever’ covers a lot of ground. But I think there’s a good argument to be made that he is.
(ed.note: For those who are interested the full Lincoln passage is: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.” It’s from his second annual message to congress — what we’d call his second State of the Union address — in December 1862.)
