This morning on C-SPAN's Washington Journal, Tulane-trained historian and former-speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, offered a succinct, reasonable, and balanced piece of analysis regarding the presidency of George Bush.

Peter Slen asked Gingrich to respond to a brief clip from the news conference yesterday, in which a reporter asked the President to assess whether he was an asset or liability to the 2008 Republican campaign. The President smiled, winked, and said forcefully with mock certainty: "Strong Asset! Next Question."

Newt chuckled and asserted:

"First of all, the President is a fact [of life for Republicans running for office in 2008].

"He is an honorable man who has worked very, very hard on very hard problems. He has succeeded more than some people want to give him credit for. We are safer than we might have been, if someone with less character had been president during this trying period. On the other hand, he did not recognize how deep and how hard the problems were. As a result, the nation is deeply dissatisfied with him and a government that seems supremely incompetent."

Well said. This struck me as a savvy summary, which I think will prove fairly close to the future consensus among open-minded historians.

Related (sort of):

Writing in the current issue of Imprimis, the monthly publication of Hillsdale College (view here), Amity Shlaes offers an unorthodox and critical account of the New Deal, Franklin Roosevelt, and the Election of 1936.

Her narrative bemoans the end of traditional American federalism and the beginning of interest politics, which she ascribes to the baser motives of the first Roosevelt campaign to retain the presidency (1936).

Read the article and decide for yourself.

An aside: if you are not a subscriber to the unabashedly conservative and eminently erudite Imprimis, which is absolutely free, I encourage you to sign up now.

My larger point: history is argument. We often speak to one another about the present through conversations about the past. This is a valid function of history.

Amity Shlaes takes the same set of facts employed by a generation of historians who admired FDR and made us admire him, and she turns them on their head. Perhaps she has a point. Perhaps she misses completely. Either way, she has every right to throw her interpretation into the academic arena and see how it plays.

My caution: history is, by definition, subjective. No matter how hard practitioners attempt to avoid prejudice and "presentism," history is always filtered through the personal, the political, and the present. That is, we cannot write the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about any historical subject. We can only write what we know, which is limited, as viewed through our lens, which is colored, delivered in language that will be subject to further interpretation by future recipients.

Having said that, May God Bless the Historians.