Now that we know what the near future might look like, it may be worthwhile to ponder how the past will appear.

All eyes now are on President-elect Barack Obama as he prepares for power. But the more instructive exercise may be to examine what President George W. Bush will look like a generation or more after he leaves power in January.

The fact that the president was all but invisible at Republican congressional and senatorial rallies and barely appeared at John McCain’s side this fall is a potent measure of the disrepute in which Bush is held — and of the steep hill he has to climb if he is ever to claim historical redemption. But all chief executives leave office knowing that their reputations in history often have little to do with contemporary views of their presidencies.

Stature can grow

John Adams was the only early president to fail to win a second term until his son also achieved that distinction; today he is regarded among some historians as a pillar of probity and judgment. Dwight Eisenhower left office with people saying that if Americans wanted a golfer in the White House they should have elected Ben Hogan; now the 34th president is regarded as a shrewd wielder of power and people, the master of the “hidden-hand presidency.”

On Election Day 2008, even as Americans were going to the polls in record numbers to repudiate the eight years of Bush, The Wall Street Journal ran not one but two pieces that referred to the revisionist view of Herbert Hoover, long regarded as the founding father of the Great Depression and as the high priest of stubborn American individualism. The Herbert Hoover birthplace in West Branch, Iowa, is a lonely place, especially on a windy plains afternoon, and Hoover remains one of the great punching bags in American civic life and on the cabaret comedy circuit. But in recent years, some historians have acknowledged that some of Hoover’s efforts to fight the economic crisis were precursors to the New Deal, not impediments to Franklin Roosevelt’s battle plan.

McCullough magic

In all of American history, no man may be a more successful rehabilitator of presidential reputations than David McCullough, who first rescued Harry S Truman and then, in perhaps an even more difficult accomplishment, pulled John Adams from the recycling box of history.

“I was very interested in the individual man, the personality, the character, the quality of mind and the quality of resilience, keeping a clear eye on the mission,” says McCullough. “The best presidents have all had a strong sense of history and saw themselves as not being just judged by tomorrow’s headlines and polls.”

So is there hope for George W. Bush, whose approval ratings on Election Day were around 20 percent, the lowest ever for a president, according to the CBS News tracking poll?

Obama may determine legacy

The answer: Maybe. The ironic reason why: Bush’s place in history may depend on how well President Obama performs.

Obama has no use for Bush, as we saw in a year of brutal campaigning against the Bush record, the Bush persona, the Bush philosophy. But if Obama withdraws American troops from a more tranquil, if not exactly serene, Iraq, then historians may say he was able to do so because of the success of the Bush surge. If Obama stabilizes the Middle East, historians may say the ground was prepared by Bush’s resolve in eliminating Saddam Hussein from power. If Obama brings some order to the financial markets and some confidence to American consumers, historians may credit the dramatic action undertaken by Bush and Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr.

There is no question that Bush faces an arduous climb toward presidential rehabilitation. The model may be Truman, who was reviled at the end of his term. Today he is a folk hero and a byword for presidential character.

Bush has professed little interest in how history regards him, just as he professed little interest in his public-approval ratings. But he is from a family with a history — his grandfather was a Republican senator from Connecticut, his father a member of the House, a diplomat in Beijing, the director of Central Intelligence, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, chief American delegate to the United Nations, a two-term vice president and a one-term president.

“The main factor is time,” says McCullough. “Some 50 years have to pass. You have to wait for the dust to settle. You have to see what follows them. You need information to come to the fore that isn’t available in contemporary times. It’s very hard to judge how presidents will be evaluated.”

Bush plainly knows this. No man lives in a house redolent with history and makes decisions that will live in history without recognizing the caprice and ultimate justice of history. And remember, at Yale Bush majored in … history.