By William C. Shelton

(The opinions and views expressed in the commentaries of The Somerville News belong solely to the authors of those commentaries and do not reflect the views or opinions of The Somerville News, its staff or publishers.)

News coverage of the race for the White House has been a blessing to its current occupant by eclipsing news of his performance. As we consider the coming election, it may be useful to compare what we want with how we’ve been had.

At 71 percent, George Bush now has the highest disapproval rating since pollsters began measuring it. But popularity is not a good measure of a presidency. Abraham Lincoln, for example, was broadly unpopular by the autumn of 1863.

The measure of a bad presidency, for me, is neither popularity nor lack of accomplishment. It is lasting damage to the Republic and the wellbeing of its citizens. Such a judgment requires assessment of past failed presidencies and their impact on our shared history. By that measure, I judge the younger Bush to be the worst U.S. president ever.

James K. Polk launched an unprovoked attack on Mexico. When Mexicans resisted, Polk claimed that Mexico had "invaded our territory and shed American blood upon the American soil." Some Congressmen questioned his truthfulness. Sound familiar?

In an interesting parallel, one of them was from Illinois. He denounced the war as "from beginning to end, the sheerest deception" and said that giving Polk the authority he asked for would make it impossible to "fix any limit" to his war making. Congress ignored Abraham Lincoln.

William McKinley initiated the U.S.’s role as an overseas imperial power by starting a war against Spain. His WMD was the sinking of the Battleship Maine, which the Navy later found to have resulted from a boiler explosion. Admiral Dewey was sent to ‚Äúliberate‚Äù Filippinos, but native land forces successfully overthrew Spanish authority. After falling to his knees and seeking divine guidance, McKinley replaced Spain as the Philippines colonizer. When Bush was asked if he had sought advice on Iraq from his father, he said, ‚Äúthere is a higher father that I appeal to.‚Äù

In this tradition, Bush’s justification for the Iraq invasion was fictional. But unlike Polk and McKinley, his management of the war has been so disastrous that I need write little more on  it. Except this:  the ‚ÄúBush Doctrine Doctrine‚Äù has undermined global security. Any nation can now justify an attack on its neighbors as preempting imagined threats to national security.

In a country bitterly divided over slavery, President Franklin Pierce successfully advocated repeal of the Missouri Compromise, reopening the West to conflict over slavery. His successor, James Buchanan, though claiming impartiality, favored slaveholders at such critical points as the Dred Scott decision and making Kansas a slave state. He both catalyzed, and left the Union unprepared for, the Civil War. Like Bush, Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, lost the peace, undermining the effects of military Reconstruction after the war.

As with Bush, voters repudiated Pierce’s, Buchanan’s, and Johnson’s policies in midterm elections. Like Bush, they remained stubborn, unwilling to consider any alternatives to their disastrous errors.

Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Ulysses Grant earned their worst-tier designations based on administrations corrupted by lobbyists and businessmen. From the arrest of Bush’s top procurement official, to FEMA’s post-Katrina contracts, to the administration’s complicity with the K Street strategy, to it’s broad use of single-source contracts to cronies, to its squandering untold billions on Iraqi corruption, it makes its corrupt predecessors look like rubes.

No one blames these predecessors for deliberately encouraging corruption or profiting from it. But this president, or at least his brain, Karl Rove, was up to his elbows in these schemes. And Dick Cheney is sitting pretty on his Halliburton stock.

Andrew Jackson acted peremptorily to reign in U.S. banks. Lincoln temporarily suspended habeas corpus. But they offered their view of the Constitution, and Lincoln obtained Congressional authorization. Bush has done neither. He disregards any laws that he claims are inconsistent with national security. Vetoing legislation he doesn’t like would give Congress an opportunity to overturn the veto. So he issues signing statements saying that he will do as he pleases. Then he does.

He has stripped people justly or falsely accused, of rights that go back to the Magna Charta. He adopted prisoner-of-war treatment policies that disgraced the nation, alienated the world, and brought unprecedented wartime rebukes from the Supreme Court.

Herbert Hoover is harshly judged for his lack of a domestic policy. The Bush administration’s has been worse. No Child Left Behind is so ineffective, inflexible and poorly funded that states fight to opt out.

Bush’s only other significant domestic policy is massive tax cuts that have redistributed wealth from the middle class to families earning more than $377,000 annually, while hiking federal fees, state and local taxes, and co-payments for veterans and Medicaid recipients. He cut loans to small businesses and students. Following in the Harding and Coolidge tradition, he cut corporate taxes, only more so. Like them, he undercut union influence.

Inheriting the largest surplus in history, Bush created the largest deficit. To pay for wealth redistribution and war, he borrowed more from foreign governments than all 42 of his predecessors put together. China’s, India’s, and Pakistan’s total budgets, combined, are barely over one-third of what the U.S. borrows through deficit spending and balance of payments debits. Bush has turned control of future fiscal policy over to Asian central banks.

Real wages have been declining since 2003. In coming decades, America’s standard of living will plummet.

No campaign promise has ever proven so false as Bush’s promise to be “a uniter, not a divider.” He had a series of remarkable opportunities to bring the country together. Instead, like Pierce, Buchanan, and Johnson, he pursued narrow partisanship, rejecting real leadership.

He refused to work, or even consult, with the opposition party. He politicized the justice system, imposing a litmus test for judges, opposing class action suits, ignoring rights endowed by labor law, and making reluctance to violate the law grounds for dismissing U.S. Attorneys.

The U.S. has been a model of religious tolerance. No other president has sought to make the government an instrument of religious orthodoxy. His administration channeled domestic funding to demonstrably incompetent but ideologically fundamentalist “faith based” organizations. It removed scientific information on reproductive health and combating HIV from government websites. It promoted pseudoscientific “intelligent design,” opposed global population control, and blocked stem-cell research.

For most of its life, the administration denied the existence of humanity’s greatest current challenge, climate change. It suppressed reports from NASA, USDA, and the EPA. It advanced environmentally disastrous policies under such names as the “Clear Skies Initiative,” and the “Clean Water Act.” It dedicated its policies to the enrichment of fossil-fuel-industry cronies. It fought, to the Supreme Court, against making public Dick Cheney’s Energy Task Force proceedings.

Bush has exceeded every atrocity of each past failed president, and all of them together. He has transcended them, creating lasting damage that they could not dream of.

We deserve better.