There have been worse Presidents than George W Bush

The subject of Dubya's place in history came up over dinner among the international speakers at the SP.a conference in Brussels a couple of weekends back.

I put forward the controversial proposition that he might not be the worst US President ever. Indeed, given how seriously Presidential rankings are taken by US scholars, perhaps the focus of his quest for a legacy should involve a kind of reverse Mount Rushmore process: trying to establish which previous Presidents might possibly have a worse record than his own.

I felt Bush's advocates at the court of history might try to target Herbert Hoover and Calvin Coolidge, but I wasn't too sure how many others I could identify.

Now The Times has put together a high powered expert panel to rank all of the US Presidents to date.

Its conclusions suggests that I was being unfair on Coolidge and perhaps Hoover too, who are both ranked ahead of the incumbent.

But The Times panel does find four worse Presidents than Dubya - step forward William Harrison, Martin van Buren, Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan.

But they do rate George W Bush, equal with Nixon, as the worst President since the start of the 20th century.

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