From Jan of 1989 until Jan 1993, George Herbert Walker Bush was President of the United States. While his son will probably be remember more in history, was the first President Bush a success or a failure?
The Good:
Nomination of David Souter to the Supreme Court
Helped to negotiate NAFTA
The reauthorization of the Clean Air Act
The Americans with Disabilties Act
The coalition in Desert Storm
A good job with the fall of Communism and allowing the reunification of Germany
The Bad:
Nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court
Dan Quayle as Vice President
The 1988 election and Willie Horton
Failure to deal with China and Tiananmen Square
The invasion of Panama and the obsession with Noriega
Poor response to Hurricane Andrew
Pardon of the Iran Contra criminals
Failure to address the economy and the budget deficit.
All in all, George H W Bush was a slightly below average US President.
Failure I’d say…look at the number of programs he’s tried to push through and not been able too. Also it seems that (rightly or wrongly) his administration is increasingly under attack and unravelling rapidly. I have serious doubts he’s going to be able to do much of anything in his last few years…if he can hold on at all.
Yikes…my bad. Was talking about the son. The father: Hm. I’d say also a failure since he didn’t manage to get himself re-elected. However, I’ll go with ‘success’ since I think he did a good job with the Kuait/Iraq thing, managed fairly well in a flat economy and overall did a reasonable job. I didn’t vote for him either time, but I still think he did a better job than I thought he was doing at the time.
I think George HW Bush is one of the most powerful men in American political history. His political style is very reserved, but he has engineered much of the policy of this country from the background since the Ford Administration when he became CIA head. As Vice President in the Reagan administration he had a pretty strong hand in the middle east policy due to his privileged relationship with the Texas and Saudi oil families. He certainly isn’t that charismatic, which is why he lost to Clinton, but I think that who actually sits in the Presidents seat can oftentimes shadow who actually has the power.
I am going to dismiss your criteria as being completely arbitrary. He made political decisions, but I don’t think you can easily rank success and failure the way it was done in the OP. I think that sort of list shows an extreme ignorance of the nuance of the political process.
You have to judge him based upon what he was trying to accomplish, not by what you would have liked for him to accomplish. He pardoned the Iran-Contra criminals because those were his boys, he was a part of that whole affair. They split the Reagan administration down the middle by who supported Iraq and who supported Iran, but they all knew they were playign a game of divide and conquer, help those two nations destroy one another. I think that this is a better estimation of how successful he was.
I believe that he has failed because he put the wrong son in power, his son created a situation that will lead to Iran becoming a superpower, he has fomented a culture that breeds terrorism, from the training of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, to the selling of arms to both Iran and Iraq.
Where he has succeeded is that he has managed to stay at the top levels of power and play a background role for the past 40-50 years. He was a favorite of Nixons. He has been very good at toeing the party line to get himself into a position to get what he wants. I don’t necessarily know that America’s welfare was ever truly on his radar, I think he was building a dynasty for his family, which sort of happened, but I think his successor did it in.
Remember that this is the president who most unabashedly talked about a New World Order, 1000 points of light and all that. He’s gotten his New World Order, that’s a success, we’ll see where it goes from here.
Pet peeve of mine… He didn’t do jack shit. Actually he did. He told the Lithuanians not to rock the boat when they were clamoring to exit the USSR. He was overly comfortable with the status quo.
He barfed on the Prime Minister of Japan. How embarrassing for the USA internationally. At least the Prime Minister of Japan was a good sport about it, to Japan’s credit.
I thought George H W Bush was a very good President on Foreign Policy issues.
I thought George H W Bush was a very poor President on Domestic Issues.
Now that his son has set a new low for Domestic Issues, I guess I’ll upgrade the Dad to a poor President on Domestic Issues.
I think without question GHWB was one of the most qualified person to run for president in history. His resume was everything that you could really ask for. For the Kuwait war, he should be remembered fondly. He put the coalition together masterfully, went through all the steps to ensure international approval and cooperation, and had the good sense not to take Baghdad.
His domestic policy reflected his insulation from the people. Recall the famous scene where he was fascinated by a supermarket scanner. He definitely wasn’t “one of us” and nothing he did made us feel differently.
All in all he will not be remembered as either a bright star or a dim bulb. He’s going to be remembered like a journeyman race horse that sires a champion. In his case, he will be remembered more as the father of W than for what he did, and the memory will not be pleasant.
Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. He should be remembered for Gulf War I for a long time. It was a well-executed, well-planned, and well-diplomacied war of limited duration with specific goals. I admit I would have liked to see Iraq knocked over then and say to hell with the Saudis but I understand the reasoning for not doing it.
Remember, too, that GHWB had the courage to look at the budget numbers and renege on his big campaign promise of ‘no new taxes’. That takes a man for whom dogma is less important than practicalities. And that’s a rare thing in politics in ANY age.
So…not a great President but also not a failure. I like the ‘journeyman’ image.
There can be a good case made that the reason that Saddam invaded Kuwait in the first place was a failure of diplomacy and intelligence. Our unclear communication with Iraq, via GHWB’s ambassador there, made Iraq think this was okay. Obviously we watched the region for stuff like this because of the strategic Saudi oilfields. We should have seen the military build up there and warned off Saddam in no uncertain terms. This was a double failure.
Just because the following war was well executed doesn’t mean that it couldn’t have been avoided in the first place. I put a lot of blame on Bush the Senior for getting us into the mess we’re in now with Iraq, getting us too deeply involved in Saudi Arabia, which led to the rise of al Qaeda.
Verdict: He may have meant well but Bush senior was an incompetent dishrag.
I think he’s somewhat underrated in some areas. dalej42’s criticism that he failed to address the budget deficit is enitrely wrong. 100%. He made a tough choice between going back on a campaign pledge not to raise taxes to order to get the US fiscal house in order, and Clinton followed through on what GHWB began. That’s one of the key reasons we had surpluses in the mid to late 1990s: Bush started the trend away from Reagan era deficits even while dealing with a recession.
What’s more, I think it took guts to walk away from the “no new taxes” pledge when the situation clearly called for action. This decision, I believe, is on the short list of reasons why he lost his bid for reelection.
On the bad side, but not yet mentioned, was his whole “vision thing.” I can hardly imagine a politician more out of touch – or apparently out of touch with most Americans. I still think his wonderment at supermarket scanners is as damning a piece of video as Dukakis’ ill-fated tank ride.
I wouldn’t say that- the New York Times stood by the original article after reviewing videotape of the incident. I recall seeing the video too and thinking “Geez, he certainly has a sheltered life.”
