At his best, a farsighted Bush promoted the nation’s long-term interests. At his worst, he condoned intolerance. Consider “family values.” It’s a legitimate issue, because government can’t easily correct the adverse social consequences of family breakdown. But Bush’s re-election campaign turned “family values” into a thinly veiled assault on homosexuals and mothers with jobs outside the home.
What shaped his presidency-and ultimately doomed it-was a patrician’s concept of leadership. To Bush, leadership is exercised among leaders, foreign and domestic. It’s a quiet process involving political elites, and public opinion plays almost no part. Bush treated public opinion as something separate: a monster that must be tamed to keep power. This division was a self-defeating mistake.
Not surprisingly, his successes often defied public opinion. Three months after Saddam Hussein’s takeover of Kuwait, the Gallup poll found that 51 percent of Americans were opposed to a war and only 37 percent were in favor. Since the war, it has become fashionable to belittle Bush’s triumph by arguing that he brought the crisis on himself by misjudging Saddam. This argument is bogus.
True, Bush misjudged Saddam. It’s even conceivable that, with the right diplomatic and military signals, the White House might have deterred the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. But sooner or later, a crisis was inevitable. Bush didn’t create Saddam or inspire his dreams of Iraqi glory. Indeed, we are lucky that the crisis occurred on Bush’s watch. His instincts (and not his critics’) were correct. Allowing Saddam to stay in Kuwait and to develop nuclear weapons would have risked a bigger and more tragic crisis.
Bush’s handling of the economy is also underrated. Its performance was never as bad as critics said. Average unemployment (6.2 percent) bettered Reagan’s first term (8.6 percent) or Carter’s (6.5 percent). No president since Eisenhower has left office with lower inflation (3 percent). Still, the economy sputtered. But the slowdown was the inevitable result of high consumer borrowing in the 1980s, defense cutbacks and the glut of office buildings. Bush at least didn’t make the economy worse by pumping it up before the election. A skeptic of government intervention, he endured the business cycle. (By contrast, recall Nixon’s wage-price controls in 1972 and Carter’s policies in 1980.) With inflation down and companies more efficient, the economy is now poised for healthier growth.
In some ways, Bush’s greatest political misfortune was his early popularity. Until the end of 1991, his approval ratings (as measured by Gallup) remained above 50 percent. This reinforced his instinct to keep his two jobs-head of government and practicing politician-distinct.
But some governmental problems cannot be handled without ample public support. Bush coped with the budget deficits by having leaders of both parties negotiate privately and then take responsibility for a bipartisan package of tax increases and spending cuts. The resulting 1990 budget agreement, though much maligned, actually made a difference. Without it, the 1993 budget deficit would be roughly $90 billion higher. But the deficits persist because they reflect a genuine contradiction in popular feeling: we want lower taxes and more government services. Until that changes, no one dares to do more than tinker.
A president should never be a slave to public opinion. But he must earn public trust. Bush’s concept of the presidency absolved him of the need to explain to the public his view of what government is supposed to do, and why. He disdained “the vision thing.” His White House seemed brain dead, more concerned with stopping bad ideas (plenty of those) than promoting good ideas. Rising health costs and dwindling insurance coverage were ignored until the campaign forced them onto the political agenda. Legislation was largely confined to subjects that lent themselves to quiet consensus: a new highway bill, a new clean-air act, the Americans with Disabilities Act.
It was this presidential style that crippled Bush’s reelection campaign. Once his ratings collapsed-because there was no strong economic recovery-his frantic efforts to restore them only backfired. There was no base of public trust. Everything he did seemed desperate, insincere and unpresidential. The pandering to the religious right offended many independents and Republicans, who considered themselves tolerant and decent people. Employed women voted against him 45 to 36 percent. The attacks on Clinton’s draft record smeared Bush more than their target. His self-styled comparison to Truman was idiotic. Bush’s proposed tax cuts-based on unannounced spending cuts-were make-believe. All this distracted from his often-accurate criticisms of Clinton’s programs.
Bush took a contemptuous view of the public, and in the end the public took a contemptuous view of him. He tried to manipulate popular opinion in ways that were so transparently disingenuous that he seemed utterly unprincipled. Like Nixon and Carter, he was an anti-politician in the sense that he never truly enjoyed the process of getting power. What he wanted was the power, but he still intended to use it for good purposes.
Our standards for judging presidents are too sweeping. We credit them for successes they didn’t cause and blame them for problems they probably can’t solve. The proper standard is this question: where could-and did-a president reasonably make a difference? As yet, no one can answer that conclusively about Bush. Too much remains unsettled. He helped Russia only modestly after the collapse of communism. Will he be blamed if Russia returns to despotism? What will happen to the Mideast peace talks? Questions abound. But an interim assessment of Bush is possible: on the whole, not so bad.
