We got a thousand points of light
On a homeless man
We got a kinder, gentler machine gun hand
-Neil Young, “Rockin’ in the Free World”
George Herbert Walker Bush, 41st President of the United States, died over the weekend. He was 94 years old. His wife had died only recently, and he wasn’t really sick until the last few years of his life. In all, that’s as good as we can expect from a limited existence.
Of course when you have various people rendering their obituaries on the man, the common theme is that Bush was an example of decency and decorum in the White House. And since such people are trying to set a standard of decency and decorum, they do not need to say the implied follow-up,
“as opposed to the incontinent clown boy who’s stinking the place up now.”
I feel no such restrictions. I am rather proud of the fact that I have never voted for anybody named Bush, on principle. I was too young to vote for Reagan. I voted Libertarian for the first time because Bush frankly struck me as a letdown. “Read my lips- no new taxes” was that time’s version of “if you like your doctor, you can keep him” – maybe the president wasn’t actually lying, but he was certainly willing to make a promise he really couldn’t keep, while hoping his die-hards wouldn’t notice. As Nick Gillespie’s obituary in Reason put it, “There’s a reason he did not elicit strong negative responses or inspire enthusiasm: He lacked what he called “the vision thing.” And “from a specifically libertarian view, there is little to celebrate and much to criticize regarding his presidency” – Bush supported and expanded the War on Drugs to the extent of militarizing it with overseas adventures like the collar of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega.
If Mr. Bush still looks good in hindsight, it only serves to justify my axiom, “every new president somehow lowers the bar.”
Because there’s another current Reason article by Jesse Walker, where he says: “I think he was wrong on issues ranging from drugs to taxes to the S&Ls, from the Iran-contra pardons to the invasion of Panama. But it soon became clear that he was far from the worst president I’d live to see. He wasn’t even the worst one named Bush.
“So here’s to the times he moved in the right direction. Here’s to keeping his head as the Communist bloc collapsed, and here’s to overseeing an actual reduction in military spending after the Cold War ended. Here’s to a relatively even-handed approach to the Palestinian conflict. Here’s to easing up the saber-rattling in Nicaragua and letting a Central American–led peace process play out. None of those policies were perfect, but I can imagine how another leader in a similar situation could have done worse. In some cases, I don’t have to imagine it.”
This leads to another of my axioms, “it is possible for two different things to be true at the same time.”
I am reminded of how Dana Carvey on Saturday Night Live made his career as an impressionist by doing his take on President Bush for the show. At one point, someone asked Carvey how he managed to capture the character, and Carvey said it seemed difficult, but he finally hit on the idea of combining John Wayne with Mister Rogers. And to me, that was Bush conservatism in a nutshell. He acted like Mister Rogers when he should have acted like John Wayne – and he acted like John Wayne when he should have acted like Mister Rogers.
In other words, there is a time to be accommodating and compassionate, and a time to take a hard stand on principles, and the pre-Trump Republican Party could never figure out which was which.
I again recall candidate Bush’s appearance with Ronald Reagan in 1980 where the two men were asked about illegal immigration, and both men were capable of giving an intelligent response that acknowledged both the needs of the immigrants and the need of this country for labor. But intelligent and considerate policy wasn’t what their party called for.
Similarly with Bush Senior’s famous break with his no-taxes pledge. Right-wingers have been telling liberals for quite some time that America can’t afford all the government we think we want. But Republicans in particular have been very bad about making that clear. And when Bush made that pledge, he was locking himself in knowing that he might need budget flexibility in the future. And rather than ask both parties to prioritize what spending we actually needed and ask his hardliners what the consequences would be if they refused to increase revenue, Bush first played to that wing with his speeches and then played to the “moderates” by reversing himself. That’s what happens when you don’t have a “vision thing,” or a political operating system. It would of course have been worse if Bush had stayed doctrinaire, but it’s not like he wasn’t being doctrinaire in taking that position in the first place.
One thing is for sure, though: As a patrician (and someone who remembered the era when taxation was truly confiscatory) Bush would not have tried to balance the budget on the backs of the working class, as Paul Ryan did. But I could be wrong. After all, Bush Senior was also from the period when Republicans were often pro-choice. That went by the wayside so that he could join the Reagan team (just as Reagan himself had previously legalized abortion as California Governor before playing to the Moral Majority). Bush was the one who called Reagan’s policy “voodoo economics.” We can look at plenty of cases where Bush and other Republicans showed a certain standard of character, or willingness to buck their own party’s “political correctness”, that you don’t see these days, and in most of those cases, we can see where they abandoned those standards of character for the sake of votes, or to appeal to donors and lobbyists. And the Republican fire-breathers never gave such moderates credit for “compromise” because they knew they weren’t acting on principle in the first place and had no idea when they’d flip back around. So in retrospect you see the same patterns that served to sink Jeb Bush in the last presidential race, where the “professional” class of politician tried to tack hard right to win primaries so they could win nomination and pretend to be moderate to the rest of us. By that point the plebes had discovered they could draw their reactionary politics straight from the tap.
Recently one of my Facebook friends said, “if the Republican Party ceased to exist tomorrow, the result would be that half of the Democratic Party would turn into Berniecrats (which is what the Democratic Party used to be 30 years ago) and the other half would align with Hillary Clinton (which is what the Republican Party used to be 30 years ago).”
And I agree with this to a great extent.
But…
I can’t help but think that a large part of how things got to this point is that the country is getting increasingly sick and tired of a “two” party establishment where both sides by and large dropped the ball when each was in charge, and yes, that does include Obama. I mean really: would anybody, Republican or otherwise, have voted for such an unqualified candidate as Donald Trump if they thought the “qualified” people were up to snuff? Would Hillary have lost so many votes relative to Obama if they thought the qualified people had done well for the folks in Pennsylvania and the Midwest? If people actually liked the two parties from thirty years ago, then why did they change? We’ve already seen that the Republicans are sick of being sane and sensible. Now they’re scared to death of a Democrat faction that has learned from them that passion succeeds, and if “democratic socialism” has a chance in the current setting, it’s not so much a matter of it being “loony” or extreme as some people seeing a course correction from a political party that went all the way in the other direction.
Nostalgia aside, George HW Bush is an example that serves to remind us of the limitations of “prudent”, ideology-free, draw-within-the-lines governance. We are currently quite familiar with the limitations of the opposite approach.