Is Bush the Worst?

FT.com / Weekend Columnists / Matthew Engel - Anything but the best:

"Of the many differences between the US and Europe, one that always intrigues me is the American passion for categorisation, lists and rankings. It is not enough to know that there are a lot of cows in Wisconsin. Americans have to know precisely how many and, above all, where Wisconsin stands among the 50 states in cowishness.

The only slight problem with this comes when the obsession spills over from fact to matters of opinion. American political scientists and historians love to rank their presidents from the best to the worst, a parlour game-cum-publicity stunt that apparently dates back to a survey conducted by Arthur Schlesinger Sr at Harvard in 1948. Wikipedia now contains a dozen different surveys of supposed experts since then, all tabulated and averaged out as though they constituted football results.

This little diversion has come back to public attention lately because of a growing perception that we have a president who is making all these lists out of date. Last month Eric Foner of Columbia University kicked off a debate about George W. Bush in The Washington Post op-ed section under the heading “He’s The Worst Ever”.

Three other academics disagreed only mildly. Just one took serious issue: Vincent J. Cannato of the University of Massachusetts said such pronouncements were “too often ideology masquerading as history”. Cannato is, of course. right. But the very arena for this debate was interesting. In case your image of The Post dates back to Watergate, be aware that its op-ed page, in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, made Donald Rumsfeld look dovish."