In an “unscientific”—and a bit premature—poll of 109 historians released last week by George Mason University’s History News Network, 61 percent of respondents said George W. Bush will go down in history as the worst president ever. Asked to rank him among all 43 U.S. presidents, only 4 percent put Bush at 30th or better, and 98.2 percent said his presidency was a failure.

The historian who conducted the poll — which has been hailed by the Left and called bunk by the Right — excerpts historians’ fervid claims in a summary of the findings. They read like DailyKos boilerplate: Bush “lies, constantly and often, seemingly without control;”he “grandstands and mugs in a shameful manner, befitting a snake oil salesman;” he “is emotionally immature due to, among other things, his lack of recovery from substance abuse;” his presidency “is the pernicious enemy of American freedom, compassion, and community; of world peace; and of life itself as it has evolved for millennia on large sections of the planet.”

Though a much-discussed New York Times/CBS News poll recently revealed that 81 percent of Americans (a poll record) think “things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track,” Bush has mostly acted unfazed. He told Fox News in February, “As far as . . . people trying to guess what the history of the Bush administration is going to be, you know, I take great comfort in knowing that they don’t know what they are talking about, because history takes a long time for us to reach.”

Despite the Bush disillusionment, HNN’s poll hasn’t been the talk of the town; the GWU project isn’t the most august outfit. (Though a minor back-and-forth has ensued in the blogosphere.)

Nor, obviously, is this the first historiograpic hyperbole meant to tar and feather the sitting president. Students of history typically agree that it takes years to properly adjudge a president’s legacy and policies.

In 2006, Rolling Stone ran a cover piece by historian Sean Wilentz that, while arguing Bush’s across-the-aisle hostility is partly what makes him the “worst” president, also didn’t shy away from its own partisan claims. Vanity Fair also had a lengthy contribution in December from Nobel laureate and Bush critic Joseph Stiglitz about how Bush has supplanted Herbert Hoover as “claimant for the mantle ‘worst president’ when it comes to stewardship of the American economy.”

These too-early judgments are what prompted the Social Security Administration’s public historian, Larry DeWitt, himself no Bush fan, to rebuff the poll. His claim is growingly common in academia, where enmity toward opposing ideologies has reached a nadir. He writes this:

We have gotten ourselves into such a state in this regard that most historians . . . no longer see a principled distinction . . . between our present politics and our historical judgments. Indeed, I suspect few of my colleagues see anything wrong with this kind of poll, and think I am out on some fringe somewhere with my concerns.

And Wilentz doesn’t seem to disagree, at least on paper. He wrote in his Rolling Stone piece that historians “are deeply concerned about being viewed as fair and accurate by our colleagues. When we make historical judgments, we are acting not as voters or even pundits, but as scholars who must evaluate all the evidence, good, bad or indifferent.”

When your country is about to have a major election, it’s a good time to observe the proceedings from a perch somewhere outside of it. In 1979 at Harvard, Russian historian Alexandr Solzhenitsyn made a few observations, from which I select these snippets:

Regarding the choosing of Presidents: “It is not possible that assessment of the President’s performance should be reduced to the question of how much money one makes or to the availability of gasoline….”

Regarding cozying up to China, suddenly a sticky issue in the present Tibetan troubles: “I would not wish such an outcome to any country in the world. First of all, it is…a doomed alliance with evil….”

Regarding terrorists: “Life organized legalistically has shown its inability to defend itself against the corrosion of evil…When a government earnestly undertakes to root out terrorism, public opinion immediately accuses it of violating the terrorists’ civil rights….”

Regarding the use of diplomacy with certain nations: “The truth is that the split is both more profound and more alienating…than one can see at first glance….The anguish of a divided world gave birth to the theory of convergence….It is a soothing theory which overlooks the fact that these worlds are not at all evolving toward each other and that neither one can be transformed into the other without violence.”

Regarding politicians: “Political and intellectual functionaries exhibit this depression, passivity, and perplexity in their actions and in their statements, and even more so in their self-serving rationales as to how realistic, reasonable, and intellectually and even morally justified it is to base state policies on weakness and cowardice.”

Thinking it was safe, Newsweek published its 2007 obituary of “Famous in Life, Noted in Passing” in its January 7, 2008 issue, everyone from Brooks Astor to Jack Valenti. Who knew that former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan would render the tally unprescient by her December 27^th assassination? The fact of it underscores what we all know but like to pretend we don’t — that history and the future will never proceed according to script.

You can dispatch Condoleezza Rice on her if-it’s-Tuesday-it-must-be-Belgium globe trotting, you can throw $10 billion in aid to Musharraf in the war against terrorism, as the U.S. Congress did. And some guy with a will and a way will still snake through the crowd in Rawalpindi and change the equation of power in the Middle East.

What next? Will the anti-government unrest ignited by the murder escalate? Will a broad-based coalition government rise from the ashes to tackle extremists? Will the centrifugal forces on regional divisions worsen? What will happen to Karachi, that hotbed of violence and power base of the Bhutto family?

“Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation. When his breath departs he returns to the earth; on that very day his plans perish” (Psalm 146:3,4).

By watching TV commercials, you’d think that the Big Gift to Get this year was some kind of GPS device to help you find your way to the mall you visit every week.  But the Library of Congress is very old school, and they like old maps, and they just got a brand new old map.  And there’s something of real interest on it.  Read about what’s on that map, and who put it there, and how your history teacher might have lied to you about it.

The new periodical Lapham’s Quarterly puts out themed issues (the first theme is “States of War”) compiling writings on the theme from across the centuries and cultures.  Think of it like the kind of upper-level topical seminar from college.  Here’s a Table of Contents for the first issue (you can read some, but not all, of the pieces), and here’s a review of it.

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