61% of historians rate bush worst president ever.

<"... do not reference contempory presidents, but what proof you can produce that historians are not trained on assessing the success of a presidency"

I wasn't talking about "success." Success means the ability to achieve one's goals. A bad president can be successful if he succeeded in accomplishing his aims. Hitler successfully took over much of Europe, but that didn't make him a good leader. One can objectively look at causation to see if a president's actions successfully led to the accomplishment of his goials, an assessment that has nothing to do with whether the goals were "good" or not. Again, "good" and "bad", except perhaps in an instrumental sense (e.g. good at winning elections), are not scientific criteria. Assessments of policies and politicians based on one's personal political values is subjective, not the object of social scientific research>>

the terms 'good' and 'bad' were not contained in the original thread post, and were introduced by you as follows:

***Even though I think Bush is one of the worst presidents, the obvious ideological bias of the above, regurgitating left wing and Democratic talking points, demonstrates the problem with asking contemporary historians to assess sitting presidents, since it would be virtually impossible for them to do so in a way completely isolated from their personal political attitudes. History departments tend to be very left wing, so that's going to slant their assessments. And historians aren't actually trained on assessing who is a good president or a bad one. >

1. do you have proof history departments tend to be very left wing?
2. what proof do you have historians are not trained on assessing who is a good or bad president?
3. which points of the assessment you reference are incorrect? ***

my use of the terms 'good' and 'bad' in my questions pursuant to your post were referenced to your use of those terms. your current line of argument involving extended parsing of 'good' and 'bad' vs. 'successful' and 'unseccessful' veers from the clear context of the thread. these terms have sufficient variance of definition as to be interchangable in practical use.

'success' to a president, personally, might well mean 'the ability to acheive one's goals', but this is hardly a basis from which to judge the success of a president from an historical reference or a common sense one.

george bush, using this criteria, could certainly consder his presidency a 'success' as he has acheived most of HIS goals, yet most historians, not to mention the world in general, consider his presidency an abject failure, even to the point where they are wiling to publically state they consider him to be the absolute worst president ever while he is still in office.

as you continue to expound tangentially to the question posed i can only conclude your statement from which this thread branch grew errant in content and successful refutation to a challenge untenable.

<For the record, most American historians do have a set of objective criteria for assessing the success of a presidency>

excellent point. the brief commentary excerpts from this one article are not representative of the bodies of considered writing from which they spring. some months back when this historian w.p.e. subject surfaced a few examples of the objective criteria and extensive fact based reasoning applied to those criteria by a few such historians illustrated the errancy iand lack of objectivity n ron's assertions. his reasoning discounts the back and forth scientific scrutiny which peer reviewing of papers and manuscripts so successfully provides. the scientific method applies not only to the hard sciences.

"For the record, most American historians do have a set of objective criteria for assessing the success of a presidency."

For the third time, I've already acknowledged this, but the original quotation I cited wasn't condemning Bush for being unsuccessful in pursuing his agenda, but rather condemned the value of the things he's done. It was a series of condemnations regarding his policies and actions, not on whether he was able to bring about what he wanted to bring about. Condemning Bush for passing a "tax cut for the rich" is not an assessment on how successful he was in pushing his tax policy, but rather a condemnation of the policy itself. "Unsuccessful" is not the same as "bad." A bad president can be successful in pursuing his bad policies.