More than two decades removed from the White House, George H.W. Bush’s old friend James Baker seemingly damns him with faint praise. “Twenty-five years later, history is beginning to recognize that George Bush was the best one-term president in American history,” the former secretary of state told the New York Times.
The Times piece is about Bush’s improved image on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his presidency, but it’s also a reminder of why conservatives were never taken with the man. Dick Gephart praises the forty-first president. So does Dave Obey. Tom Harkin chimes in that he was better than Ronald Reagan, “much more integral to the development of American government and the process of democracy.”
If raising taxes and growing the regulatory state are your measures of greatness, than yes, Bush 41 outstrips Reagan. Not many conservatives this side of David Brooks grade on such a curve, however.
It’s also worth noting that much of Bush’s rehabilitation has been a result of his pleasant personality and personal decency. He is the nice old man who jumps out of airplanes, wears funny socks, and shaves his head in support of a young boy suffering from cancer.
Yet Bush was a temperamental conservative in the way that his more ideologically minded successors, ranging from Newt Gingrich to his own son, were not. The old Dana Carvey sketches about Bush featured the president saying, “Not gonna do it. Wouldn’t be prudent.”
Source: nationalinterest.org
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