Last week, Kenneth T. Walsh reported in the US News & World Report, "98 percent of 109 professional historians, recently surveyed by the History News Network, believe that Bush's presidency has been a failure." In fact, according to the new poll, 61 percent of the historians judge Bush the worst president in American history.

Presidential rankings fluctuate over time. Each generation struggles to understand themselves and find consensus and community by reinterpreting their collective past, which is a productive function of history. On the downside, our historical figures ascend or diminish as a result of how we view their actions through the lens of our experience and culture rather than viewing their actions in their own time and place. Taken to an extreme, this is the trap of presentism.

If all presidential rankings are slightly deceptive and self indulgent, then attempting to rank contemporary presidents is pure folly. For example, see the late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. poll (circa 1996), which ranked Ronald Reagan in the thirties, which apparently rested on the political views of Schlesinger and his cronies much more than sober historical judgment. Although I greatly admire Schlesinger's legacy as a scholar, his dismissal of Reagan as an "average" president of little note was petty, embarrassing, and tended to reinforce his reputation as a partisan.

Other “conservative” polls have come along since then that tried to place Reagan much closer to the top of the list, but many of them have suffered from the same disease in reverse. The inherent problem with rating presidents on whom we voted (for or against) is that we seek to push our objectivity beyond normal human limits. History is best understood and cataloged and interpreted by dispassionate and disinterested practitioners of the art.

An Aside: Gordon Wood noted recently that any new history of the American distant past that mentions the current Bush administration in the preface automatically merits suspicion, suggesting that politically driven historians are too likely to allow contemporary partisanship to overwhelm training and academic integrity.

Having said all that (and mindful of my hypocrisy), let me indulge in some speculation in terms of ranking President George W. Bush.

Back in the spring of 2006, I asserted:

"All observers agree that Bush will rise or fall on the success of Iraq. Obviously, Iraq today [2006] is not what the Bush brain trust was hoping for in the spring of 2003. Notwithstanding, the manifest fact that the Bushies were naïve and sanguine about the Iraq aftermath does not necessarily preclude ultimate success. Being there has a momentum and imperative all its own."

Back then I believed that "Iraq remain[ed] an open question, a 50-50 proposition." Success meant a modicum of vindication. Regional instability equaled "a gigantic error with myriad horrific ramifications."

Today, the Iraq question remains extremely tenuous--and likely not to be resolved (or even put on a steady path to positive resolution) during Bush's watch. Things got much worse after the spring of 2006--and then they got a lot better. But Iraq continues to hang in the balance, draining the collective reservoir of optimism, resources, and will necessary for eventual victory.

Bush backers, who have their own reputations to think about, hope against all evidence to the contrary that the current 30-something approval ratings are Truman-like. We see the myriad mistakes. But we also cling to the hope that Bush's tough and unpopular foreign policy choices will prove ultimately correct and successful in the larger scheme. In the Truman mold, Bush is setting forth a bold, courageous, and transformative American policy that, like containment, will emerge triumphant at some point in the decades to come.

The President’s opponents see him more like Nixon, tangled in a web of secrecy and paranoia and shady dealings. Or like Johnson, fecklessly and tragically prosecuting an ill-conceived war that is draining the life blood out of his presidency and his credibility. Or like Warren G. Harding, who woke up one day to the realization that his clear-cut view of the world and his simple notions were not sophisticated enough to combat the problems of the modern presidency.

Time will tell.

Back then I also said: "[W]hile presidential legacies are generally not built on economic success, an economic collapse on Bush’s watch or immediately following would certainly injure his historical standing."

The President is still trying to dodge an economic meltdown. If Bush can avert economic catastrophe during his tenure, we will remember very little about Bush and taxes, mortgages, or even Katrina. If the Great Crash comes before January 20, 2009, the public consciousness will remember him as a latter-day Herbert Hoover.

An encouraging thought for the President: when he completes his second full term, he will join an exclusive club of eleven reelected-full-term presidents (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, U.S. Grant, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton). For the most part, history has been kind to these elite eleven.

Moreover, Bush is one of only twenty presidents to win election after serving as president. In addition to those listed above, four presidents won election while finishing the unexpired terms of their predecessors (Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson). Grover Cleveland won back the presidency four years after having lost it as an incumbent. Richard Nixon won reelection after a full term but resigned before completion of his second term. Abraham Lincoln and William McKinley won reelection after a full term but fell to assassins in the second.

There are notable exceptions--but, once passions cooled, mostly historians came around eventually to confirming the wisdom of the voters in first nineteen cases. Bush retains a good chance of eventually climbng much higher than many highly partisan current historians expect.

Will he rise as high as Harry Truman? Tough to say. But, undoubtedly, he will not out-distance Franklin Pearce, James Buchanan, and Warren G. Harding as the worst president ever.