People remember the Reagan years as a time when “liberal” ideas were
out of favor with the political and cultural mainstream, but Reagan
himself didn’t try to turn the L-word into a pathological term of abuse.
He didn’t have to; he was popular enough to occasionally reach across
the aisle and hang onto his base. It was George Bush who did that in the
1988 election, reaching back to the language of Joseph McCarthy, with
his prattle about “card-carrying members of the ACLU” to equate a belief
in the freedoms that come with liberal democracy with Communism itself.
 Bush didn’t mean any of that, and didn’t expect to be
remembered as someone who’d sink to pretending he did. He was pretty
frank as seeing politics as this process where a born elitist collects
votes by telling the dumbass peons that he’s with them, and then then
four years later, you coast to an easy re-election on the basis of the
steady hand you’ve shown and all the wonderful achievements you’ve
racked up—unless you’ve fucked up as bad as Bush did, in which case you
travel the country promising to divert fortunes to every community you
land in and darkly suggesting that your opponent might have colluded
with Russia when he took a college trip there more than 20 years
earlier, we just can’t know for sure.

Bush resorted to this stuff because he knew that tearing his
opponents down was his only path to victory, because nobody liked him.
There wasn’t much there to like. As much as Trump, Bush was willing to
tear the country apart for the sake of political gain. Trump does it to
feed the gaping, sucking void at his center that demands constant
applause and attention. Bush did it because he believed his family name
and immaculate resume entitled him to the job of president, and at a
certain point, to not get it (or lose It) meant unbearable humiliation.

In recent years, after Bush’s own son made him look like a sage old
chessmaster, and then Trump came along to name him look like a
combination of Cary Grant, Obi-wan, and a UNICEF mission statement, a
number of beltway wise men have chimed in to express bewilderment that
anyone could have ever called Bush a wimp. He was shot down in World War
II! What kind of wimp does that? Like the distinction between the
private morality reflected in Bill Clinton’s cheating heart and the
public morality reflected in his policy goals, their puzzlement says a
great deal about the kind of complex divisions that the ignorant
peasants in the provinces actually get better than the wise men.

In the war, Bush showed physical courage. As a politician, where he was
never going to slice and dice his way to legislative victory, his
willingness to risk his life for the right cause amounted to exactly
nothing. What would have made a difference was the kind of political
courage that made Lyndon Johnson capable of embracing civil rights as
president even though it was going to piss off the folks back home in
Texas and turn the South away from the Democratic Party.

The
only time Bush did anything in his postwar life that might have taken a
little courage was when he broke his stupid promise about never raising
taxes as president. He made that promise because he figured nobody would
remember such an unrealistic and cartoonishly pandering statement, much
less hold him to it. And he broke it because he thought he had to, and
that voters would understand that. Unlike his son, he lacked the
political instinct to realize that, post-Reagan, Republican  voters
didn’t really care about fiscal responsibility. They just wanted to say
they did, to justify the gutting of public services and the social
safety net so they could have some more tax cuts.  

In a recent
book, wise man Jon Meacham has a little crying fit on the subject of how
it must have been they’re for a man as fine as Bush to spend the
sixties voting and inveighing against civil rights and voting rights for
blacks, something Meacham assures the reader he had to do out of
political necessity. Then Bush became president and expressed his
objection to having the Voting Rights legislation protected. That was
after he’d nodded approval of the verdict in the Rodney King trial and
then sent his press secretary out to blame the riots on the advances in
civil rights in the ‘60s, which had unrealistically gotten people’s
hopes up. If you look at Bush’s actual record of votes and stated
positions, you’d conclude he was quite a scumbag, just as a cursory
examination of his roles in Watergate and the Iran-Contra affairs would
tend to make it appear that he sure didn’t think the law applied to
powerful Republicans.

The Meachams of this world would counter
that it’s wrong to judge a career politician by what he did and didn’t
do and claimed to believe; all that should matter is that, compared to
the nouveau-riche gangland scum and middle-class Tea Party dingbats that
comprise the contemporary Republican Party, Bush was a Gentleman.  If
nothing else, it has the virtue of obliterating the myth that snobbery
is sometimes an affirmation of true values.