"James Buchanan is throwing a champagne party"
This piece from the Dartmouth Review about Jeffrey Hart is enjoyable, as is the response from Hart to the article’s author. I particularly like the anecdote about this conclusion being edited out of the published version of Hart’s book The Making of the American Conservative Mind: National Review and Its Times:
“Bush will be judged the worst President in American history, from both a conservative and a liberal point of view, finding a consensus on the bottom, at last, and so achieving a landslide victory that evaded him in 2004.”
Hart explains later that his premature assessment of Dubya has been amply vindicated:
[William F] Buckley did object to my conclusion that Bush had been the worst American president in that earlier draft. He thought it too categorical, and, at the time I was writing, he was right. That was soon after the 2004 election. But much of the evidence now is in. And I’m sure that somewhere James Buchanan is throwing a champagne party. He’s no longer the worst.
(h/t: Clive at Andrew Sullivan)