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Host, it takes several decades for any kind of real historical consensus to form about any particular president. There are still reassessments of Eisenhower going on, fercrissakes, and we have had 50 years to digest his impact. We're now seeing some revisions among historians about even FDR. Truman is generally viewed positively by historians, but as you know, he declined to run for re-election in 1952 because most of the country thought he was a disaster.
This is a long way of saying it's way too early to speculate about history's verdict on GWB. We'll need at least 20-30 years of seeing how things turned out before we can make any real assessments, and even then they'll be tentative.
Then again, I'm one of those guys who think Zachary Taylor is very underrated as a president, and JFK vastly overrated. It also strikes me, looking at American history, how overall lucky we have been in the people who have ended up leading the country. It hasn't been uniform, but for the most part we have had genuinely talented and conscientious people as Presidents. The bad presidents have been more of the "nonentity" variety than the evil variety.
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