How Not to be President

In today's Washington Post Doug Brinkley has an interesting preview of how history will judge President Bush. The answer is not well.

This last point is crucial. Though Bush may be viewed as a laughingstock, he won't have the zero-integrity factors that have kept Nixon and Harding at the bottom in the presidential sweepstakes. Oddly, the president whom Bush most reminds me of is Herbert Hoover, whose name is synonymous with failure to respond to the Great Depression. When the stock market collapsed, Hoover, for ideological reasons, did too little. When 9/11 happened, Bush did too much, attacking the wrong country at the wrong time for the wrong reasons. He has joined Hoover as a case study on how not to be president.

When an historian is comparing you to Hoover, you've got problems. Big problems. Even worse when this judgment isn't including the worsening situation in Afghanistan, the war he fore sake for Iraq.