Sorry for the delay, but it's been one of those weeks/weekends. I was asked for my thoughts on Bush and I figured I would share them. To sum it all up, Bush seemed to be a genuinely nice man... but he should never have been President.
Looking at Bush's biography, the man lived an interesting and impressive life for the most part. As he aged, he became more of a bureaucrat, but before that he was an heroic fighter pilot who defended the US bravely in World War II. I respect that. I also respect that he seems to have become a genuinely nice person after he left office, befriending everyone and living the kind of life we would hope all retired people could live. There are dozens of stories too of good deeds and kindnesses that he did throughout his life which back up the public persona. For example, there was a story the other day that he stayed in Washington, D.C. at Christmas so the Secret Service team protecting him could be with their families.
He also did seem to care about people, though I always felt that he didn't really relate to people. Indeed, I think here is the crux of the problem with Bush. He lived in a world of elites. He knew those people. He related to those people well... he did not relate to normal people. Hence, it is no coincidence that since his retirement, many of the stories about how good of a person he is are connected to relationships he's had with elites, e.g. Michelle Obama. What is less common is stories of Bush interacting with average people. What's more, the times Bush is described as good to average people tend to come in the vein of "he's good to servants." The Secret Service story is an example, this is Bush doing a favor to employees.
By comparison, consider Peyton Manning. When he retired, we started hearing amazing stories about this man. On his own, he handwrote thousands of letters to people he met expressing gratitude for things related to them personally -- ways they touched him. I saw a show on this with people reading the letters and most cried as they read them to the camera. We learned that he volunteered his own time religiously to visit sick kids and spent hundreds of thousands of his own dollars buying food for Katrina victims and personally delivering it. Or take Roger Stabach who has a legion of people who swear their love for this man. A couple talk about the lengths to which he went to stop them from killing themselves when no one else even noticed. Others talk about him personally rescuing their imploding lives through personal gestures. Stories like this are typical for these amazing people. Bush, while awash with stories of being pleasant or volunteering as a spokesman for one thing or another, has no stories like these where he connects on a personal level with average people.
Why does this matter?
I think it explains the problem with Bush. He never related to real people. Bush was amazing at dealing with Kings and other Heads of State. He was quite adept at running an organization like the CIA. But he was clueless at understanding us. That was the scandal when he was asked the price of milk and couldn't answer it. That was the problem when his rhetoric sounded like an accountant reading code rather than a neighbor talking to you. That was why he was so slow to understand how his actions hurt the average person, why he never fought back when the Democrats smeared him and conservatism (because to him, it didn't matter -- he didn't believe it and none of his friends at the cocktail party wanted to hear it, even as it felt like a heinous personal slander to millions of us), why he didn't understand how fuel taxes and income tax increases would break the people who supported him, and why it always felt that he was more comfortable at international conferences than meeting people in diners.
This kept him from seeing how he was destroying conservatism, and I would honestly say that Bush destroyed conservatism.
Reagan's administration was the culmination of decades of real people fighting back against liberal experts. Reagan saved America -- and that is not hyperbole. He built a multi-racial, multi-gender, broadly American coalition of common sense believers who were busy rebuilding an America that had been brought to its knees by decades of liberalism: weak military, horrible military doctrine, defeatism, hyper-regulation, excessive taxation, a world clogged by lawyers, a pro-criminal criminal justice system, lunatic courts, growing racial spoils, etc. Reagan and his followers worked hard to turn these things around.
Bush, however, came from that world of experts. And when he ran after Reagan left office, he slandered conservatism (calling for a "kinder, gentler nation" as if conservatism were hateful) and he cut deals to undo large parts of Reagan's agenda. What's more, he let the left slander and smear him and conservatism without defending either. This crippled conservatism and let the left dump all kinds of hateful ideas onto conservatism -- ideas we still need to refute today because they came to be seen as "fact" when he seemingly verified them.
(As an aside, the view of Bush as "nice" did not arise until after he befriended the Clintons. That's when the media fell in love with him. Before then, he was portrayed as an out-of-touch, rich corporate-tool, too-white racist who was too stupid to run the country. They even knowingly lied about him having affairs.)
It also revived the anger conservatives felt at the country clubbers (of which Bush was a member) who seemed to like losing to the Democrats because that made their cocktail parties less contentious. This sheered off a chunk of conservatives who drifted to "true conservatism," a destructive ideological purity that still costs the GOP several percentage point each election. It also made the rift between the party power brokers and the public much larger than it had been in decades, making the GOP an ungovernable party at the national level.
Then he pushed elitist ideas like creating the "New World Order" along international lines. This generated massive paranoia in the fringier elements of conservatism. All those idiots screaming about black flags and secret this and that got their start believing that Bush had sold the country to foreign elements.
I think Bush was a nice guy, but out-of-touch with real people. He played by the rules of elite society and, in those terms, he was a decent elitist, unlike so many of the rest. But as a President, he was a total failure. He destroyed America's momentum, devastated his friends, and let us be painted with moral-crimes that the left continues to hold against us today. I also see him as the guy who spurred the paranoid, hyper-purity-obsessed state of modern conservatism through his failures.
I know a lot of people like him and you're not supposed to talk ill of the dead, but that was what I saw going through those years. I truly get why so many people abandoned the party of Reagan to support H. Ross Perot. In 1988, the public at large viewed liberalism as a failed experiment and saw liberals as crazy. By 1992, liberalism had become hip and conservatism had lost its meaning and was seen as the ideology of corporate lobbyists and out-of-touch rich whites. That was Bush's legacy.
Thoughts?
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