Democrat Ned Lamont, the darling of liberals when he defeated Connecticut Democratic Sen. Joe Lieberman in the 2006 Democratic primary, has it right: George H. W. has been undervalued as President — and I’m predicting he will get his historical due. Here’s part of what he writes in RealClearPolitics:
Presidential surveys put him in the middle of the pack, but he should be moving up. We have had mostly foreign policy rookies as president over the last generation. But as the Berlin Wall came crashing down and Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, the man in the Oval Office was a decorated war hero and had been a U.S. envoy to the United Nations, ambassador to China, CIA director, and Ronald Reagan’s vice president. America was well-served by his experience and his character.
One thing that set Bush apart from many other President was: he had a resume and was proud of it, but he didn’t like to boast. To be sure, he jumped out of airplanes in his 70s and parachuted, but he would have considered it unseemly to do so as President — and unseemly to fly onto a aircraft carrier as President as a certain son of his did.
Like Dwight Eisenhower a generation before him, Bush 41 was on firm footing when he stood up to the militarists who wanted to expand the scope of Operation Desert Storm and take out Saddam Hussein.
As Bush wrote in his memoirs, “Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.” Victory belonged to American leadership and an eclectic international coalition, including troops from Syria and Egypt, with support from Russia and much of the cost picked up by Saudi Arabia.
And it’s clear that his son George W. Bush in some ways wanted to do things differently than his father. Not just the invasion of Iraq — done on the now proven false grounds that Saddam Hussein was involved with 911. The elder Bush handled foreign policy as President as someone who seemed planted as much in the world of diplomacy as in the world of the military. It was less President by gut feeling and emotion. It was a Presidency of impulse control.
The collapse of the Soviet Union was the transformative event of the late 20th century. Engaging Mikhail Gorbachev and integrating the new Russia into the new world order was politically controversial — and described as naïve — but Bush had the credibility and the resolve to stand up to the doubters. President Obama is now confronting a more aggressive Russian leader and a war caucus pushing for a more assertive U.S. military posture in Iran and Syria and Ukraine. It is worth asking: What would George the Elder do?
On the domestic front, he sought out a 1990s version of the grand bargain, a budgetary mix of tax increases and spending cuts. On the political front afterward, Bush was vilified, particularly by conservatives: “Read my lips, I lied,” screamed the New York Post. Pat Buchanan roughed him up in the 1992 Republican primaries, Ross Perot finished him off in the general election, and Bill Clinton was made president.
Bush was indeed vilified and the political price he paid was to give other Republicans pause to compromise.
The flip side of a political profile in courage is a portrait of cowardice and there have been enough of those portraits to stock CostCo’s around the country and fill years of Home Shopping Network programming.
Bush paid a price, but the country gained:
But on Bush’s watch, the top income tax bracket was raised from 28 percent to 31 percent and real discretionary spending started trending down. The federal budget deficit declined during his last year in office, eventually morphing into a surplus over the next eight years. As a one-termer, he got precious little credit for the rising employment rate, which began improving before he even left office, or a stock market surge that also began on his watch and continued for most of Bill Clinton’s time in office. The market gains during Bush’s tenure exceeded those of John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt, but did not quite match Clinton and Reagan. (The presidential stock market king is Calvin Coolidge, followed by… Barack Obama.)
Bush the Elder’s term was an extraordinary four years for our country and helped lay the groundwork for another eight years of peace and prosperity, something acknowledged by the JFK Library Foundation last week when it named George H.W. Bush a 2014 recipient of the prestigious John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award for the political fortitude he demonstrated in dealing with the federal budget.
“President George H. W. Bush risked his reputation and ultimately his political career,” said President Kennedy’s grandson, Jack Schlossberg, “and should not be forgotten.
And, I’d be willing to bet that like the once underrated Eisenhower and the once hated Harry Truman, he won’t be.
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.