Rolling Stone’s cover story this month is an analysis by Princeton historian Sean Wilentz on just how horrible the Bush administration is, really. (Answer: Oh, so horrible.)

While not revealing anything new, the article puts Bush’s presidency in historical context, laying out each of his major failures (it’s a long article) in the arenas of foreign policy, domestic policy, and personal credibility and competence and how they compare to the deeds of some of the other jerks who have held that office.

Bush is a particular tragedy as his presidency comes at such a critical time. The worst possible man to govern at the most important possible time.

How does any president’s reputation sink so low? The reasons are best understood as the reverse of those that produce presidential greatness. In almost every survey of historians dating back to the 1940s, three presidents have emerged as supreme successes: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt. These were the men who guided the nation through what historians consider its greatest crises: the founding era after the ratification of the Constitution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression and Second World War. Presented with arduous, at times seemingly impossible circumstances, they rallied the nation, governed brilliantly and left the republic more secure than when they entered office.

Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties — Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush — have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures — an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.

Full article.

996 days to go…