The eulogies for Bush 41, (the father of W*, y’know), are getting a long run this week, to be capped by Wednesday’s state funeral in D.C.. And as usual with passing leaders, the reflections are heavy on hagiography.
In general I won’t quibble with the assessment that 41 was a decent guy (mostly), unfailingly polite to friends and foes (until his people weren’t), respectful of government traditions (as far as that goes), prepared to take a hit to correct a problem before it turned into a crisis and a far (far) better role model for the country’s youth than the shameful vulgarian currently squatting in the Oval Office.
In other words, as the Republican presidents of my lifetime go, he was up there with Dwight Eisenhower in terms of competence and ethics. But hagiography is a lazy, mush-headed exercise in any situation and certainly when the deceased has been a major international leader. As an adult no longer guided by fables and fairy tales I believe it’s better for all concerned to roll the warts, the blunders and the occasional hook-up with sleaze merchants into the historical narrative.
I’m always amused at how the media’s fulminating “small gummint conservatives” seem never to recall a Republican in the White House since St. Ronald of Hollywood. Until he died this past week how many times in the past year have you heard any pundit or politician even mention the name(s) of either George H. W. Bush or his son? It’s like they never existed. There was only Ronald, who should be on Mt. Rushmore, (perhaps carved over Abraham Lincoln) and then we jump to … well, most of them are still pretending Trump is a closet Democrat.
But here’s a shocker. I had no time for Reagan. Him launching his 1980 general election campaign with a speech lauding “states rights” (i.e. white nationalism) at the Neshoba County Mississippi fairgrounds, seven short miles from where the Ku Klux Klan murdered three civil rights workers barely a decade earlier, would have been disqualifying enough, if he hadn’t already played the feckless toady during the House Un-American Activities hearings on The Hollywood Ten. After that you can move on to his presidency. Refusing to lift a finger to control the AIDS epidemic, (that gay crap don’t play with the “states rights” crowd, so bleep ’em). And then jump to Iran-Contra and the usual Republican legacy of an astonishing run-up of debt and gutting of social services.
Reagan was a doltish tool for the ruling class who could read a script and tell a joke. Hence: The Great Communicator … to the Neshoba County-like, “states rights” base.
My regard for Bush 41 would be different today had he not preceded Reagan’s “states rights” strategy by renouncing his support for civil rights legislation being pushed by Martin Luther King (and Lyndon Johnson) in an effort to win votes in Texas in 1964. Playing the racial animus card for personal political game is always and forever a bridge too far. You want to change your attitude on taxes or pothole repair? Knock yourself out. But no truly moral human being ever … ever … inflames racial antipathies to get elected to a better job.
But then comes the 1988 campaign, which starts out with selecting … Dan Quayle, a Sarah Palin-like cipher — as his VP choice. (I was there at that moment next to the levee in downtown New Orleans.) Dude, you and John McCain … you lose serious points from the get-go for really bad, un-presidential judgment.
And it gets worse in ’88 by hiring on the D.C. “lobbying” firm of Charles Black, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and Lee Atwater, and giving them a long run of leash to pull every sleazy, race-baiting trick they could think of against Mike Dukakis, including Lee Atwater’s notorious “Willie Horton ad”.
The retch-inducing shamelessness of that was, like Bush 43’s attack on John McCain as the illegitimate father of a black child during the South Carolina primary in 2000, all too typical of how the brahmin-like Bushes campaigned. Naked, cynical attacks on the street level under-girding a lofty, statesman-like pose from the podium.
That of course has been and still is from page one the Republican playbook, ever since “states’ rights” resentment-mongering guaranteed them white “working class”/”silent majority” votes over 50 years ago.
So yeah, in a very imperfect world where no human is ideal, and where as Bob Dylan says, “behind every beautiful thing there’s been some kind of pain”, Bush 41 was better than others. Maybe though just by being less reckless with the truth and less indecent than what we’re enduring now.
All that says though is that the bar is pretty damn low.
Brian,
I so love your stuff and pass it on to friends and family. I so loathed Reagan and blame him for the shameful way the mentally ill, homeless and Viet Nam vets were treated. My list of hatred for the man goes on and on. Thanks for your opinion, I so agree with you.
Thank you, Beth. Here’s to a better New Year.
I agree with most everything you said about GHWB. With the exception of the Gulf War and not tripping us into some conflict related to the collapse of the Soviet Union (two worthwhile accomplishments) – he was a middlin’ president. And, yes, Reagan was no great thinker; he used to carry index cards with him to keep him on message and the sentences therein were not reminders of topics to address but actually represented his entire thinking on complex topics like climate change, arms limitation and the economy.
And I think our new tradition of memorializing dead political leaders for a week or so is a sign of an empire past its prime.
But…were it in my power to amend the Constitution to let either Bush or Reagan resume the office and replace Trump, I would do it in a second. Even in their current states.
I’d take George W. Bush back. Jimmy Carter. Bob Dole. Nixon. George McGovern. I’d take you or Loveland or a person picked at random from any street corner in America. I’d take any resident of the homeless encampment on Hiawatha.
I’m not exaggerating for effect. I’m 100 percent serious.
Well, based on that endorsement I am announcing my candidacy for POTUS. My lone promise — and this is where you come in … a new crisis every hour.
You literally couldn’t do worse. Lambert 2020.
I don’t disagree with a word of this, but the charitable remembrances are largely because Bush Senior looks infinitely better through today’s Trump-era lens than through a Ford-or Ike-era lens.
Think about George Senior as the 2016 President or Senate Majority Leader compared to the current options. What I wouldn’t give for that.
In terms of ideology and approach, the guy who led, actually led, on the Americans with Disabilities Act compared to the guy who mocks disabled people? The guy who led alt right cheers of “lock her up” and tried to use his Justice Department to actually do it compared to the guy who voted for Hillary when only 8% of rank-and-file Republicans did so? Using a Trump-era lens, Bush Senior not only looks better than Trump, he looks better than about any statewide elected Republican in the nation today.
Yeah, there’s all that. But as I say … normal, uninspired governance … is kind of a low bar.
To Brian’s point, from The Nation…
George H.W. Bush, Icon of the WASP Establishment—and of Brutal US Repression in the Third World
Obituaries have transformed the terror that Bush inflicted, depicting it as heroism.
By Greg GrandinTwitter
George Herbert Walker Bush represented a ruling class in decay. His WASP awkwardness, his famous syntactical struggles—described in obituaries as an ah-shucks genuineness, a goofy, “irreducible niceness”—was symptomatic of an Establishment in crisis. Franklin Foer, writing in The Atlantic, notes the nostalgia of the encomiums. The public apparently yearns for a time when politics were less coarse, when the country’s clubby elites were well-bred, well-voweled (compare the pleasantly rolling i’s and o’s found in the Harrimans and Roosevelts with the guttural u of today’s ruling clan), and well-mannered, their grasping and groping kept out of the press, for the most part.
What Foer doesn’t mention, and what is perhaps the single most important through-line in Bush’s life, is the way the extension of the national-security state, and easy recourse to political violence in the world’s poorer, darker precincts, allowed Anglo-Saxon men like Bush to stem the decomposition and to sharpen their class and status consciousness…
https://www.thenation.com/article/george-h-w-bush-icon-of-the-wasp-establishment-and-of-brutal-us-repression-in-the-third-world/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow
Does Foer mention Bush 41 as head of the RNC keeping the wolves away from criminal scumbags like Spiro Agnew?