When President George Bush is inaugurated into his second term this week, the Washington Post reminds us, it’s also going to mark the solidification of the fact that the Bush family is now one of the most successfully political dynasties in American history.
It notes that the Bushes haven’t been stylesetters and if Bush had lost in November the family’s standing could have been shaky. But:
By any objective measure, political scholars say, Bush is a name that belongs
next to Adams, Kennedy and Roosevelt as a force whose influence spans
decades.Robert Dallek, author of a recent book on JFK and of other presidential
biographies, is not an admirer of Bush policies but acknowledged that Bush’s
victory vaults father and son to a new historical plane.With a defeat last November, the Bush family legacy would have had a
certain accidental quality: a father who reached the Oval Office via the vice
presidency but could not win a second term, and a son who became president
despite losing the popular vote. Instead, the president’s close but unmistakable
victory shines a new light on the family’s formidable accomplishments. By the
end of the 43rd president’s term, Bushes will have occupied the White House for
12 of the previous 20 years — "a match for Franklin D. Roosevelt in terms of
time in office," Dallek noted. "And it gives the father more of a place in
history than he might otherwise have had."
Also, the Post points out, most political families face a downward trend, but with the Bushes it has been heading in one direction for years:
Most notable is its
clear upward trajectory, each generation exceeding the political success of the
one before it. Prescott S. Bush, the 43rd’s grandfather, was elected to the U.S.
Senate at the age of 57 in 1952, serving two terms before his retirement. George
Herbert Walker Bush went from two terms in the U.S. House through a succession
of presidential appointments before his single term as president — losing to
Democrat Bill Clinton in a contest that family friends say left a bitter residue
that George W. Bush was determined not to taste for himself.
It’s further noted that unlike the charisma of the Kennedys, the Bushes have a charisma of plainness. As a result celebrities don’t gravitate to them or support them, and that doesn’t bother the Bushes since that’s not a focus of their world, the paper says.
Most FASCINATING is a quote that confirms the little inklings we’ve read over the years about the Bushes: they have a long memory and don’t like to be crossed:
This is not to say that the Bushes do not keep score. In a December interview
with Time magazine, the president’s father made plain that he does — and that
his son’s victories can help settle some of his own accounts. The elder Bush
recalled a nasty remark that Ann Richards, later the governor of Texas, made
about him at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta in 1988."Remember when Ann Richards said George Bush was born with a silver
foot in his mouth?" he asked writer Hugh Sidey. "And then when George beat her
in his first run for governor, I must say I felt a certain sense of joy that he
finally had kind of taken her down, I could go around saying, ‘We showed her
what she could do with that silver foot, where she could stick that now.’
"
Given all this…is it a wonder why some say: "Watch Jeb"?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.