Treatment of Bush has been a disgrace
 

This has been the most popular article in the wall street journal for about a week now.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122584386627599251.html

People forget how HORRIBLY Truman was treated - and it didn't stop at him, it extended to his family as well. Most of it was because he didn't choose to suck Douglas MacArthur's pole and, oh, open the door for WWIII. The problem was the Dems had been in power for 20 years at that point and any time one party is in power for too long you get a backlash - just as with any celebrity who gets too big.

I don't know that I'd put W on the same level though. He has done some of the things he did for different reasons than Truman did.

Exactly - Truman was hated by a large portion of the country upon leaving office. It has only been in recent years that his reputation has been rehabilitated.

That's not to say that Bush will end up ranked as highly as Truman, but as you mentioned, it gives a good example that Bush isn't the first, and won't be the last, President to leave with low popularity rankings.

In my opinion, a lot of people are influenced by what the Media feeds them which is not always the honest truth and as a result peoples perceptions become clouded.
So I believe that President Bush's approval rating is mostly a direct result of the media ability to change perceptions instead of his true leadership ability.

despite the reasons for his ratings (media, etc.) i think he really feels it. i watched him speaking to Obama the other day and he just looks worn out....of course no president leaves without aging a great deal, but it really shows in his face and the way he speaks...

8 years in office will do a lot - it's crazy to look at the before and after pictures of Presidents.

I think Bush's presidency will be much better regarded by history than it is today.

I do i agree i think the treatment of Bush from the media has been nothing short of a disgrace. I think in a few years we will get a better perspective, but i think people need to show much more respect for their President.

"For now, we have a new president-elect. In the spirit of reaching across the aisle, we owe it to the Democrats to show their president the exact same kind of respect and loyalty that they have shown our recent Republican president." --Ann Coulter

People didn't start off showing disrespect and disloyalty to Bush. He received a lot of support particularly after 9/11 and received votes from nonRepubs. He was fighting an uphill battle in some regards and Americans from both sides of the aisle were initially going along for the ride.

But Coulter knows that already.

I feel sorry for Bush and think he's probably a cool guy. Some of this is of his own doing, though.

He had a pretty high approval rating right after 9/11. I'm not sure exactly when his approval rating started to dive, but it seemed pretty steady over a period of time.

If the Democrats had been able to field a viable candidate in 2004, who knows. But, they chose Kerry, who has been living off of Kennedy's good work in Massachusetts since he took office. I think it could have been interesting if there had been a half-way decent candidate for the Dems in that election.

I will be very interested to see how history judges Bush. He's not going to leap into the top 10 Presidents or anything like that, but history tends to obscure the mistakes of many Presidents (FDR's court-packing plan, for example).

I agree here and some of it is his own doing, but we also have to look at the whole picture, not just Bush. It's not just the president who makes all of the decisions. People keep making bad accusations of his decision to go to Iraq, but his staff had a large part in the decision to go there.

The buck have to stopped somewhere. He is the President and he has to take full responsibility for his actions. It's great to say that his staff did this and that, ultimately, his staff did not make the decision to go into Iraq. It was him and congress. Those who voted for him and Bush bear the main responsibility.

I agree, but it was his staff that made the mistake with the WMD drama. They said there were WMDs and there weren't any.

I don't know if you saw the movie "W", but something like this was in the movie. It was a good movie. The same guy who directed Nixon did this one too. Oliver Stone I think.

Ditto. I think he is probably a perfectly lovely person. I just didn't (and don't) like the way he leads. It takes a certain person to be President in the state we're in and I just don't think he has it. Maybe if everything was easy peasy he might have been an okay leader. But he just...didn't make the wisest or most sensible decisions...to say the very VERY least. :rolleyes: And you can't really afford that when all eyes are on you. Unfair but it comes with the territory.