Yeah, this looks bad:
A plurality of voters think Barack Obama is the worst president since World War II, a new poll says.Really? No one else? Not even Bill Clinton?
According to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday, 33 percent of voters think the current president is the worst since 1945.
Obama's predecessor, former President George W. Bush, came in at second-worst with 28 percent, and Richard Nixon was in third place with 13 percent of the vote. After Jimmy Carter, who 8 percent of voters said was the worst president in the time period, no other president received more than 3 percent....
After all, the last time Quinnipiac did a worst-presidents poll, in 2006, Clinton was regarded as America's third-worst post-WWII president, barely less awful than Richard Nixon. (George W. Bush topped the worst list, at 33%, followed by Nixon at 17% and Clinton at 16%.) And Clinton was ranked as the absolute worst by Republicans, white Protestants, and white evangelicals. Now only 3% of the survey respondents think he was the worst, and even among Republicans the number is only 4%.
And those 2006 poll results weren't Clinton's worst. Remember the notorious online survey conducted by the New York Post in 1999, in which Bill Clinton was declared the second most evil person of the millennium, with Hillary at #6, both of them as write-ins, with Free Republic as the driving force behind the voting? (Hitler was #1; Stalin, Pol Pot, and Joseph Mengele were #3, #4, and #5.)
And remember back in 2000 when George Will could write something like this without fear of seeming out of line?
Bill Clinton may not be the worst president America has had, but surely he is the worst person to be president. There is reason to believe that he is a rapist ("You better get some ice on that," Juanita Broaddrick says he told her concerning her bit lip) and that he bombed a country to distract attention from legal difficulties arising from his glandular life....If you lived through the Clinton years, you know how thoroughly right-wingers were worked up into a tribal sense of hatred against Bill and Hillary. That was still relatively fresh in wingers' memory the last time Quinnipiac asked about bad presidents, so of course Clinton got a lot of thumbs down.
And then, in 2008, the right-wing tribal elders cynically declared Hillary Clinton a blameless victim of the new object of their hatred, Barack Obama. Bill and Hillary were rehabilitated; they ceased being unpersons on the right.
And now Bill Clinton gets through these polls unscathed.
Barack Obama will bounce back, too. Soon, in all likelihood, the right will declare Hillary Clinton the worst person in America, and Bill just as awful. By 2017, right-wingers will be told that the Obama days were as nothing compared to the unspeakable awfulness of President Hillary's reign of terror. To the right, the worst president of all time is always the most recent Democrat.
