“I want a kinder, gentler nation.”
—George H. W. Bush
George H. W. Bush was one of the youngest pilots in World War II, and was shot down and rescued in 1944 after a bombing raid on Japanese forces in the Bonin Islands
Senator Rudman bragged about tricking the Bush White House into appointing David Souter to the Supreme Court
Bush ran on a pledge to cut the capital gains tax from 28 to 15 percent, and President Bush did achieve that rate cut—only it was a different President Bush
After serving loyally as Ronald Reagan’s vice president for two terms, George Herbert Walker Bush won election in his own right in 1988. He had a well-earned reputation as a decent and generous man, with a moderate Republican ideology. The ups and downs of his single term show the inadequacies of both decency and moderation in modern presidential politics. The first Bush presidency is also an object lesson in how to squander the successful legacy of a predecessor—in this case, the legacy of Ronald Reagan.
The most important political fact of the Bush presidency was the manner in which he won the election—a lesson Bush largely forgot after taking office. The 1988 election was in many respects a referendum on the Reagan presidency; Bush ran, in effect, for a third Reagan term. Bush reassured conservatives at the Republican convention in 1988 when he declared his fealty to Reaganism with the pledge: “Read my lips: No. New. Taxes.” The man who had derided tax cuts as “voodoo economics” in 1980 now offered his own supply side fillip: Bush proposed to cut the capital gains tax from 28 to 15 percent. In the fullness of time George Bush lived up to this pledge—just not this George Bush. Conservatives felt betrayed when George H. W. Bush broke away from Reagan’s policies and principles.
And liberals will never forgive Bush for pointing out the deep liberalism of their 1988 nominee, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. Dukakis had tried to conceal his liberalism behind the veneer of managerial “competence,” and liberals cried foul when Bush pointed out his furloughs for murderers, vetoes of bills calling for public school children to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, opposition to the death penalty, support for gun control, and membership in the American Civil Liberties Union. Liberals howled because liberals think such appeals to fundamental cultural values should be out of bounds. They do not appreciate that presidential elections are about character and value questions above all. And by 1988 most Americans disliked liberalism. As political journalist William Schneider wrote at the time, “Why has liberalism become such a scare word? The reason is that Reagan has changed the shape of American politics.” Instead of defending their unpopular positions, liberals attacked Bush for “running a negative campaign.” This has become the template for liberal interpretations of national elections ever since (especially in 2004). But as political scientist Aaron Wildavsky observed, “A negative campaign is one in which the wrong candidate loses.”
Despite owing his election largely to the legacy of Reagan, Bush went to some trouble to distance himself from Reagan, most pointedly in his convention speech, with language about seeking to bring about “a kinder, gentler nation.” (“Kinder and gentler than whom?” Nancy Reagan is reported to have asked.) After the election the first order of business for the Bush transition was turning out all of the Reaganites as quickly as possible. It was said of Bush appointees that (unlike Reaganites), they had mortgages rather than ideologies. Paul Weyrich said that he had always feared that the election of Bush meant the arrival of “country club Republicans who couldn’t wait for the end of the Reagan administration.” George Shultz’s top aide at the State Department, Charles Hill, recalled, “It was suddenly clear that this would be an adversarial transition. The new people were not friendly. The signals were: get out of here as fast as you can.” Newt Gingrich cautioned, “We are not Bush’s movement.”
In domestic policy Bush abandoned Reagan’s caution about extending government regulation. Both regulation and federal spending began rising rapidly after the years of restraint under Reagan. Bush sponsored several new statutes that expanded federal regulation and litigation—including especially the Americans with Disabilities Act, a well-meaning but poorly drafted statute. He also sponsored a new Clean Air Act that extended the reach of the Environmental Protection Agency and set in motion the ethanol boondoggle. And Bush signed on to a new civil rights law that Congress passed after the Supreme Court ruled that some forms of racial preferences were unconstitutional. He also increased federal education spending because he had promised to be the “education president.”
“I’m conservative, but I’m not a nut about it.”
___________________________
George H. W. Bush
But Bush’s biggest mistake was raising income taxes to fight the federal deficit. He abandoned his “no new taxes” pledge in the worst way possible—both agreeing to raise income tax rates and giving in the Democrats’ demands that he drop his call for a cut in the capital gains tax. Bush later regretted the deal, but by then it was too late. By 1992, Bill Clinton was able to run to Bush’s right, hitting Bush for raising taxes and promising to “end welfare as we know it” (welfare was an issue Bush had ignored). Bush not only lost the conservative base that forms the core of the Republican Party, but he lost independents, too. In the 1992 election, two-thirds of voters who voted for Bill Clinton told the exit polls that Bush’s abandonment of his “no new taxes” promise was a “very important” factor in their decision to support Clinton.
If Bush’s tax increase and domestic policy generally conceded too much ground to liberalism, one aspect of his economic policy deserves praise. When the economy entered a mild recession in 1991, Bush and his team wisely decided that the best course was to do nothing—to let the natural economic cycle play itself out without some kind of counter-productive government intervention or “stimulus.” Bush was the first president since Harding to adopt this course—and to refrain from repeated public pronouncements explaining how his administration was working to revive the economy. The wise decision not to intervene in the economy came at a high political cost, though; Bush’s laissez-faire policy and silence about the economic crisis contributed to his fall in popularity, and left Bill Clinton an opening to campaign on the theme, “It’s the economy, stupid.” Bush would have been better served by a more forceful economic message, even if it had been just an explanation of why the government would only make things worse if it intervened. Instead, he offered no defense of his policy.
One reason Bush performed poorly on domestic affairs is that, by his own admission, he lacked “the vision thing.” The one area where he was something of a visionary was foreign policy—which is not surprising, given Bush’s extensive background in foreign affairs. He had served as UN ambassador and director of the CIA before he became vice president. Unfortunately, Bush embraced an internationalist vision, in his own words, “a new world order”—a description that rightly raised Americans’ suspicions that their president put too much confidence in the “world community.”
It was unfortunate that Bush chose this ill-conceived phrase and failed to grasp how unpopular it was outside the Beltway, for his management of foreign affairs during his one term was generally laudable. When the Berlin Wall came down suddenly in November 1989, Bush was wary of inflaming a potentially unstable situation and issued a statement so low-key it made people wonder if he was on valium.
Bush’s management of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990 and 1991, while uneven and vulnerable to numerous criticisms, was generally capable, and he played a central role in easing the way for the reunification of West and East Germany, which was a very sensitive issue for all of Europe.
Reporter to the president, on the fall of the Berlin Wall: “You don’t seem elated.” President Bush: “I’m not an emotional kind of guy.”
The most memorable foreign episode of Bush’s presidency was the 1991 Gulf War, “Operation Desert Storm,” for which Bush assembled a large international coalition to reverse Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. The swift and decisive victory of American arms in the Gulf War was vivid testimony to the rebuilding of American military capabilities and morale under President Reagan over the previous decade. The Gulf War, however, ended inconclusively. While Iraq was forced out of Kuwait, the offensive stopped short of dislodging Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Bush and his team miscalculated, believing that Hussein would be overthrown by his own people in the aftermath of the war. Instead, the United States had to return to finish the job twelve years later.
President Bush made two appointments to the Supreme Court, and the contrast between them shows the hazards of the often careless appointments many Republican presidents have made over the decades. Bush’s first appointment, David Souter, was one of the very worst Republican appointments ever made to the Court, while his second, Clarence Thomas, was one of the best.
Bush appointed David Souter to replace the radical liberal William Brennan in 1990; Souter was chosen precisely because he had no “paper trail,” and Bush wanted to avoid a confirmation fight like the one that had brought down Robert Bork in 1987. Bush had been assured that Souter would be a “home run” on the Court, but he should have been wary when Souter revealed that his model justice was Oliver Wendell Holmes. (In fact, any prospective judicial appointee who admits to admiring Holmes should be disqualified from appointment by any conservative administration that is awake.) Liberals were suspicious of Souter, with many groups like the National Organization for Women opposing his confirmation. They needn’t have worried. Once confirmed, Souter quickly lurched to the left, voting to uphold abortion on demand and joining the liberal bloc in almost all major cases that reached the Court. According to the Wall Street Journal, retired New Hampshire Senator Warren Rudman, one of Souter’s chief sponsors for the appointment, later took “pride in recounting how he sold Mr. Souter to gullible White House Chief of Staff John Sununu as a confirmable conservative.”
Bush made up for this blunder with his second appointment in 1991: Clarence Thomas. As Thomas was a conservative black and only the second black to be appointed to the Supreme Court (Thomas was replacing Thurgood Marshall), the left went all-out to defeat his confirmation. Bush’s support for Thomas wavered briefly when the left rolled out a trumped-up sexual harassment charge against him, but Bush ultimately held firm and Thomas was confirmed. He has gone on to be the strongest voice on the Supreme Court for reestablishing the Founders’ understanding of constitutional interpretation.
President Bush 41 (as he is often called to distinguish him from his son) deserves credit for a steady hand in conducting foreign policy—which satisfies the president’s most important constitutional duty: defending the nation. His appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court is also a very large factor weighing in Bush’s favor. But his major blunder with Souter and his acquiescence in expanding government regulation knock Bush’s constitutional grade down to a straight B.