There's A Pony In Here Somewhere

It's a good thing Mister Man doesn't pay attention to polls, because this one is the icing on the cake.

Strong Democratic sentiment pushes President George W. Bush to the top of the list when American voters pick the worst U.S. President in the last 61 years. Bush is named by 34 percent of voters, followed by Richard Nixon at 17 percent and Bill Clinton at 16 percent, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released today. Leading the list for best President since 1945 is Ronald Reagan with 28 percent, and Clinton with 25 percent.

Damn. Bush is double Nixon on America's Shit List. That's gotta hurt. Or not, since he famously Doesn't Care What People Think. Or know, for that matter.

And, of course, there is a rather schizophrenic vein in the poll, with Clinton placing high in both "popular" and "unpopular". What's important there is the white protestants/evangelicals fueling Clinton's "unpopular" figure, and that's what we're going to take a look at tomorrow, if I can finish this damned paper on organizational change in time.

In the meantime, I can certainly agree with the poll in that Junior is by far the worst preznit in my lifetime (which would be, uh, 19 sixty-something), but it also made me contemplate how depressing the list is. Corruption and mendacity epitomized in Nixon. Bein pensant inneffectuality of Carter. The merry corruption of Reagan and his gang of sociopathic elves, many of whom are working for the current maladministration. The WASPy diffidence of Poppy Bush. And the glandular exploits -- culminating in an enormous waste of sheer potential -- of Bill Clinton.

I dunno. Longtime readers will attest that I was as ferocious a Clinton critic as you could find; the amount of patience I had with his parsing and preening and fundraising hijinks could scarcely be spotted with an electron microscope. And yet, in my lifetime, I would honestly have to admit that Clinton at the very least had the most intellectual and real-world potential to achieve greatness. The same Republican Congress that forced him to keep his spending impulses in check and to seriously reform the welfare system, also hamstrung and sandbagged him at every fucking opportunity, so that they could stick a malleable meat-puppet like Junior in there, and get serious about robbing the country blind.

Junior is in many ways the flip-side of Clinton, especially in the idealistic sense. Throughout his various glandular exploits, Clinton at least strived to reach our "better angels", whereas Bush and Cheney simply live to pull off a wondrous bank caper, distracting us by appealing to our base impulses. It is government by id and superstition, and it cannot survive, as such a regime must eventually eat its own tail for sustenance, probably sooner than we all realize.

Again, more on this tomorrow. The exciting world of organizational change awaits.