What George H. W. Bush Got Wrong
When we rank, reconsider, laud, or denounce past Presidents, living or dead, we are taking stock of our own times. In that sense, the vindication of George H. W. Bush is a reflection of what we know we’ve lost. Jon Meacham’s new biography of Bush, “Destiny and Power,” makes that plain from its very first pages. “Americans unhappy with the reflexively polarized politics of the first decades of the twenty-first century will find the presidency of George H.W. Bush refreshing, even quaint,” Meacham writes in his prologue.
.. But there is more at work here than Meacham acknowledges, and it has to be weighed in any full accounting of Bush’s life and leadership. Bush shrank from defending the tax increase, in part, because he had always shrunk from challenging, in any principled, public way, his party’s right wing.
.. The woman refused to shake the Vice-President’s hand. Bush complained in his diary:
There’s something terrible about those who carry it to extremes. They’re scary. They’re there for spooky, extraordinary right-winged reasons. They don’t care about Party. They don’t care about anything. They’re the excesses. They could be Nazis, they could be Communists, they could be whatever. In this case, they’re religious fanatics and they’re spooky. They will destroy this party if they’re permitted to take over.
.. Bush deplored the rightward lurch of the G.O.P., but lacked the will or the fire to fight for its future. He did not, in the phrase of William F. Buckley, Jr., “stand athwart history, yelling Stop”; he tried, instead, to go with the flow. The fact that Bush disbelieved some of the dogma he espoused is not, in the end, exculpatory.