Matt and I were talking last night about our capacity to judge whether George W. Bush is the worst president in American history.

Is our judgment clouded because we’re currently living through his presidency? After all, we feel most strongly about things when we’re living through them.

Is our judgment clouded by our revulsion for the man? Concluding that Bush is the worst president in American history would certainly justify my revulsion. Knowing that he’s the worst president ever would give me some satisfaction. I want him to be the worst president ever. For that reason, I’m wary of my judgment. Is my revulsion greater than what Nixon-haters felt during Watergate, or what people felt during Carter’s hostage crisis, or what many gays felt toward Reagan during the AIDS nightmare of the 1980s, or what I, an 18-year-old political newbie, felt toward George H.W. Bush in 1992? The heat of the moment can distort one’s views.

According to Wikipedia, Harding and Buchanan are usually judged the worst presidents. Harding is best known for his corrupt administration, Buchanan for his incompetence. But Harding’s presidency didn’t have any lasting negative effects on the country, and Buchanan, while he didn’t lift a finger to stop the impending civil war, didn’t really make things worse than they already were. Bush, however, will leave the nation worse than he found it through active mismanagement. He has failed spectacularly.

A piece by Sean Wilentz last year, “The Worst President in History?”, claiming that Bush is in fact the worst ever, makes a pretty strong case.

Meanwhile, veteran journalist Jules Witcover has a piece behind the New York Times firewall today: Who’s Worse, Nixon or Bush? Unfortunately, this piece is only available to TimesSelect readers, but here are some excerpts:

Having been in Washington for only 53 years, I cannot from personal exposure espouse the view that the current president is the worst in American history. I have observed only 10 of them since reaching the age of reason, so I can judge only that he is the worst in my adult lifetime.

From World War II to date, there is in my mind and experience only one serious and obvious competitor: Richard Nixon. I say that not simply because he was the first president to resign from office in scandal and disgrace. Well before the Watergate affair that eventually was his undoing, he had compiled a long record of deception, deceit and duplicity. […]

Nixon’s sins basically grew from an unquenchable lust for power. He was determined to hold on to what he had and to get more and more of it, contrived through secrecy and an anything-goes political ethic that in time poisoned much of his five-and-a-half-year presidency.

In the end, the damage done to the nation was arrested by a change in the Oval Office… the Watergate nightmare essentially shook America domestically without more than temporarily impairing her relations with the world. […]

George W. Bush, on the other hand, who ran in 2000 as a unthreatening “compassionate conservative,” soon encountered a crisis and a fateful opportunity that put him on a different mission. He seized on the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to segue from domestic affairs and a legitimate self-defense invasion of Afghanistan to a radical foreign policy of supposedly preventive war in Iraq. […]

In a bold display of opportunism, Bush anointed himself as a “war president” who capitalized on a combination of American patriotism and fear to set the nation on its current course. As Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security adviser in the Carter administration, has written, Bush’s use of the phrase “war on terror” was “a classic self-inflicted wound” that intentionally created “a culture of fear in America,” enabling him to mobilize the public behind his military actions. […]

While Bush continues to have the power of the veto with which to combat the Democratic challenge, he is staggering toward the finish line of his presidency. Whatever happens in Iraq, there seems little chance that history will accord him any positive legacy for his eight years of over-reaching in foreign policy and abuse of civil liberties at home.

Nixon’s fall from grace in 1974 cast a heavy shadow over some historic achievements, most notably his opening to China. But his sins, deplorable as they were, mostly concerned domestic matters. They did not leave his party in the hole that Bush’s radical adventurism abroad has dug for the Republicans, and for the country he has so catastrophically led, without any compensating accomplishments akin to Nixon’s, domestic or foreign.

For Bush to be the worst president in American history doesn’t mean that he has to be the worst president imaginable. (Hitler, Kim Jong Il or Pol Pot are some who would be worse.) He merely has to be worse than any of the other 41 men who have held the office. Someone’s got to be the worst. Why must it be the effect of a present-day bias to think Bush is the one?