When I saw the cover of the latest issue of Rolling Stone, with the headline, “Worst Presidency Ever?” I toyed with the idea that the editors had been reading Pensito Review. (Or maybe Jann Wenner is reading my mind. Yes, that must be it!) As constant readers know we have included “Worst President Ever” as one of our topics since last November and had been discussing it amongst ourselves here in our dusty electronic garret months before that.

The article’s author is Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz, and I think if he had written the title for Rolling Stone’s cover, he would have omitted the question mark:

George W. Bush’s presidency appears headed for colossal historical disgrace. Barring a cataclysmic event on the order of the terrorist attacks of September 11th, after which the public might rally around the White House once again, there seems to be little the administration can do to avoid being ranked on the lowest tier of U.S. presidents. And that may be the best-case scenario. Many historians are now wondering whether Bush, in fact, will be remembered as the very worst president in all of American history.

In our discussions here at Pensito Review, my colleague Trish offered Andrew Jackson as a candidate for the Worst President Ever because he ordered the genocide of the Cherokee after the Supreme Court had decreed that they could not be forced off their lands in Georgia and North Carolina.

According to Professor Wilentz, historians generally list three presidents as the nation’s worst: James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Herbert Hoover. But now it seems clear that President Bush may have topped them all in incompetence and recalcitrance:

Calamitous presidents, faced with enormous difficulties — Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Hoover and now Bush — have divided the nation, governed erratically and left the nation worse off. In each case, different factors contributed to the failure: disastrous domestic policies, foreign-policy blunders and military setbacks, executive misconduct, crises of credibility and public trust. Bush, however, is one of the rarities in presidential history: He has not only stumbled badly in every one of these key areas, he has also displayed a weakness common among the greatest presidential failures — an unswerving adherence to a simplistic ideology that abjures deviation from dogma as heresy, thus preventing any pragmatic adjustment to changing realities. Repeatedly, Bush has undone himself, a failing revealed in each major area of presidential performance.