Welcome to Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, December 19th. I'm Anastasia Glova and I'm sitting down with Gene Healy, senior editor of the Cato Institute and co-author of the Cato Study, PowerSurg, the constitutional record of George W Bush.

Gene discusses how posterity has come to view past presidents and concludes that wartime big government

presidents have been unquestionably more popular among academics than their quieter counterparts even

when controlling for party affiliation.

The president's just suffered a massive public rebuke and his approval rating is still in

the 30s.

So how do you think that history will look back on this administration?

Well, I think the administration has been an absolute disaster

and that President Bush has been a failure on almost any dimension you could think of so I

would like to think that history is going to make a similar judgment but I'm not

so sure if you look at what historians are saying now about George W Bush, it's pretty clear that they

hate him.

History News Network did an online poll of historians, kind of informal, but 81% of them said

he was a failure. You had Sean Whelence

who's a historian at Princeton he did a big story for Rolling Stone magazine

suggesting that George W Bush was the worst president ever, which is a pretty

sweeping historical judgment.

I mean, you know, what about Woodrow Wilson or any number of presidents you could name? But I think one way to figure out how history might judge him is to look at the first thing that most people look at when they want to find out how historians judge presidents and these are these

perennial rankings of presidents you've probably seen them they survey a bunch of

historians and they rank the presidents in order from best to worse as a result of these surveys.

And if you look at those surveys, you find that some of the presidents that win, or most of the

presidents that win actually are presidents who you know are the

...