There have been enough eulogies of Bush Senior that there is not much left for me to add, but let me put in a few comments shaped by the others.
Bush Senior has been compared to Eisenhower, both in the sense of being a moderate Republican and in that he was an eminently competent but never really got the chance to shine because he presided over good times. But there is also a sense that, as with Eisenhower, Bush, Sr. deserved more credit for the good times than he got.
Eisenhower got us out of the war in Korea and resisted pressure to join the war in Vietnam, so he deserves credit for presiding over peace.
Bush, Sr. came into office just about a third of the nation's savings and loans were failing, the country had experienced two old-style bank runs, and people began to fear about the health of ordinary commercial banks. The crisis was overrunning our ordinary ability to close banks and cover deposits. The Bush Administration cleaned up the mess, prosecuted offenders, restored confidence in the financial system, and avoided serious economic fallout.*
He also undertook the last significant environmental initiative by a Republican -- measures to curb acid rain. Sulfur emissions were acidifying rain and causing subtle but real environmental damage. As with global warming now, the relevant industries insisted that acid rain wasn't happening, that if it was happening it wasn't man-made, and that if it was man-made, it was beneficial, and besides, it couldn't happen because it was against their principles. Bush, Sr. was ultimately convinced that acid rain was real but rejected direct regulations to curb sulfur emissions in favor of a cap and trade system that limited total emissions and allowed companies to decide how to limit emissions and permitted trading of "pollution units." Once companies made cutting sulfur emissions a priority, it proved to be cheaper and easier than anyone had hoped, and an environmental crisis was averted.
But it was in foreign policy that Bush, Sr. most distinguished himself.
When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Bush, Sr. assembled a broad international coalition to drive the Iraqi forces from Kuwait, a war that (once again) proved much quicker and easier than anyone had hoped. He then decided not to go all the way and remove Saddam from power. I have seen some eulogies that saw this as his critical mistake, one that paved the way for his son's disastrous Iraqi invasion. I disagree. The disaster of the Iraq War proves just the opposite, that we should salute the senior Bush's wisdom in deciding not to go all the way. Yet HW did make a serious mistake at the end of the war. Instead of recognizing that Saddam was sufficiently weakened by his defeat not to be a menace, he committed himself to a policy of regime change, saying that Saddam was an intolerable menace no matter how much he was weakened. It was that, and not the decision to leave Saddam in power, that paved the way for the future war. This is not to deny that even a weakened Saddam would have been an adversary and a bad guy. But we have lived with adversaries in power before and can do so in the future as well.
Bush Senior's greatest triumph was in his management of the end of the Cold War and the fall of Communism. It has been commented that his skilled management of the fall of Communism made both his predecessor and his successor look better than they otherwise would have. The meaning of this is clear for Clinton. He benefited from a peaceful and secure time after the fall of Communism. How can Bush, Sr. retroactively make his predecessor look better? One can debate how much credit Ronald Reagan deserves for bringing down the Soviet Union and Communism. But assuming he deserves full credit, it would look like an empty accomplishment if Eastern Europe had imploded into war and chaos. That the end of the Cold War was followed, instead, by Eastern Europe democratizing and joining NATO makes the victory well worth winning.
And now to more controversial matters. Many Democrats never forgave HW for the nastiness of the 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis. Many Republicans say that HW should have won in 1992 and that the polarization that followed is the result of Democrats playing dirty and winning.
What does it mean to say that Bush, Sr. "should" have won? If it means that he would have made a better President, that is normal and perfectly acceptable partisan politics. It may or may not be true.
Certainly it seems fair to say that our problems with Russia today are the result of our failure to integrate Russia into the post-Cold War order. That, in turn, is the result of the failure of the Washington Consensus, backed by Bill Clinton, on restructuring the Russian economy. The Washington Consensus approach to ex-Communist countries was the assumption of the more pain, the more gain -- that we should shut down as much of the Russian economy as possible as quickly as possible and trust that something better would take its place. The end of Communism was triumph for the US, a revival of hope for Eastern Europe -- and a disaster for the former Soviet Union. Only by understanding just how great that disaster was can we understand why Vladimir Putin is the man he is and why he is so hostile to us.
Bill Clinton supported the Washington Consensus that inflicted this disaster. Two questions pose themselves. One is, would Bush, Sr. have done otherwise. Presumably he had some sort of plans and the people who worked with him in managing the transition know what they were. So I am open to persuasion one way or the other whether Bush, Sr. would have acted otherwise. The other question is whether Soviet society was so rotten that nothing good could possibly have emerged no matter how the fall of Communism was handled. And that, I believe, is one of those counterfactuals that can never be answered.
And then there is the claim by some Bush, Sr. supporters that the ever-escalating polarization we have seen since 1992 is an understandable reaction by Republicans to the trauma of their defeat in 1992. I concede that the ever-escalating polarization that troubles our country did become visible with the Clinton win in 1992. And I am slightly more sympathetic than before of Republicans' claim that the loss was unfair and/or traumatic. After winning the Gulf War, Bush, Sr. did, indeed, look invincible for the next election. To see his overwhelming lead melt away in so short a time, all because of a minor recession must have been quite shocking. And Democrats really had controlled Congress longer than was healthy for one party. Republicans may has felt they had a stable equilibrium with Democrats controlling Congress and Republicans the Presidency. To lose the Presidency as well carried the specter or being shut out of power altogether.
But it doesn't quite hold. The Reagan Administration began with a severe recession -- a painful but necessary measure to break the inflationary spiral that had reached 14%. Once the inflationary spiral was broken, the Fed let up on the breaks and the economy bounced back. There was an implied contract there -- endure the severe recession and double digit inflation will be gone permanently. But many Americans saw another contract -- endure the severe recession and there will never be another. When it turned out that the business cycle was still with us, many people felt that a promise was broken. As for being locked out of Congress, in those less polarized times the Congressional minority was by no means as powerless as it is now and could expect to have its wishes taken into account.
Some Republicans seem to complain that it was particularly unfair to deny Bush, Sr. a second term, particularly given that he had been so successful in his first. The implication here is that if only the Democrats had shown the decency to wait until 1996 to win, Republicans would not have felt the need to freak out.
Look, to state the obvious, losing elections is partisan politics as usual. Yes, granted, since the New Deal two term Presidencies have been the rule and one term the exception and usually the result of a particularly bad performance (see Jimmy Carter). But that is just a generalization. There is no particular norm that says in incumbent President must be reelected unless he has done something specifically wrong, otherwise we would not have serious reelection bids.
Besides, if we are going to argue that defeating a successful incumbent President violates a norm, then it should be pointed out that the general rule since the end of WWII has been eight years of one party in power followed by eight years of the other. If the Democrats violated a norm by winning in 1992 and should have waited until 1996, then Republicans violated a norm by winning a third consecutive Presidential term in 1988 -- the only time one party has won three consecutive Presidencies since WWII.
And that is when we come to the unpleasant side of Bush, Sr. At the outset of the 1988 election, it looked as though the country would, indeed, revert to the mean and switch parties after two terms. This led to a complete freakout on the Republican side and all those lowdown, nasty ads that ultimately defeated Dukakis. It showed an ugliness in the Republicans that hadn't been seen since Nixon's day. It suggested that they wanted to replace the old norm -- each party holds power for two terms and then the other takes over -- with a new one -- only Republicans get to be President. And if that is so, then it would follow that Republicans would not accept a Democratic victory in 1996 any more than they did in 1992. Indeed, the longer Republicans held the Presidency, the more they would see it as a birthright and any Democrat as illegitimate.
Certainly there was no sign of any of this in the way Bush, Sr. governed. But there were other signs during the Bush, Sr. Presidency of the polarization that would follow. Newt Gingrich, Roger Ailes, and Rush Limbaugh, three major drivers of the polarization, were on their way up. We cannot know how well Dukakis would have handled the savings and loan crisis, acid rain, the fall of Communism, or the invasion of Kuwait. Certainly he would be hard-pressed to do as well as Bush, Sr. did. But the argument that Bush, Sr.'s defeat in 1992 was so outside the norm and so traumatic as to lead to all the polarization we have seen since is simply not convincing. The seeds of polarization were there. If the Democrats had won in 1988, it would have started four years earlier. If they had won in 1996, it would have started four years later. The underlying problem -- a party unwilling to accept defeat as legitimate -- remains regardless of the names at the top.
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*There was a mild recession in 1991 which cost Bush, Sr. the election, but it is by no means clear that it was related to the savings and loans.
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