By coincidence, I’ve been thinking about George Herbert Walker Bush over the past couple of days, on account of being partway through Steve Kornacki’s The Red and the Blue, a history of 1990’s politics, and specifically in the midst of his account of the 1988 and 1992 elections. Until I learned of his death last night, my thoughts were wholly divorced from the H.W. of our time, a man whose wife recently passed and who himself was reported to be in declining health. Instead, I had only been considering Bush at the height and then sudden nadir of his power; a man who had achieved the highest presidential approval ratings in U.S. history in the wake of the Gulf War, only to find himself soundly rejected in a national election that subjected him to the one-two punch of Bill Clinton and Ross Perot. What I had been reading in Kornacki’s book provoked familiar feelings, of contempt for the man and pleasure at his comeuppance. (One of my favorite political photos of all time is of H.W. and James Baker III in the latter days of the 1992 campaign, the strain and understanding of their coming defeat clear on their faces (though the joke would ultimately be on me, as Baker would subsequently head up George W. Bush’s legal efforts in the 2000 Florida recount)).
It was under the Reagan presidency that I began to be aware of politics, but it was with the election and presidency of H.W. that I became more fully conscious, beginning with following the 1988 election closely, being a (useless) elector for Michael Dukakis under a high school social studies project, and then running through the next four years of his dramatically arcing presidency. H.W. was my first intimate Republican villain, partially against whom I began a lifelong process of developing my own political knowledge and framework. In many ways, he was a great teacher; for instance, as a sometimes comic example of the unsuccessful image-making politicians engage in, as he tried to overcome the so-called “wimp factor” by cultivating an image of Hollywood toughness that simply did not match his character. Yet this effort went beyond image to substance; as has already been pointed out countless times today through the miracle of Twitter, this rebranding effort led his campaign to issue the infamously racist Willie Horton ad against Michael Dukakis, a deeply flawed candidate who surely would have been defeated without it.
There is a strong case to be made, one that I largely agree with, that our nation is not well-served by greeting the death of major politicians with a white-washing of their records; to honor the dead by dishonoring history is not an exchange I’m comfortable with (for an effective and no-punches-pulled argument for this perspective, I recommend this thread by Amanda Marcotte on the afore-mentioned Twitter machine). I am as self-righteous as the next guy, and have, though with mixed feelings, felt no small satisfaction in reading this morning’s accounts of H.W.‘s various political sins.
Yet this pressing need for speaking the truth must be balanced against acknowledgment of our common mortality, and of the fact that even people with whom we vehemently disagree leave behind loved ones and friends who are deeply affected by their passing. This alone would call for some measure of respect and compassion in the healthy critiques of the deceased’s record; at a minimum, it seems inhumane to offer such critiques without pairing them with an acknowledgment of the inevitable sorrows of the man’s passing.
But beyond this, a particular obligation comes with how we mark the passing of a politician in a democracy. Whatever his political failures, George H.W. Bush was elected president by the American people, and deserves some measure of respect for this. And even more crucially to the argument I am trying to make here, he was then removed from office by the American people. That is, in answer to those of us who believe in fighting for an accurate view of history in the face of efforts to lionize his accomplishments, the inescapable reality is that voters long ago already rendered a judgment on the man’s capacity to be president — and it was not a pretty judgment. In a three-way race, he won only 37% of the vote; quite a thumping, as his son might say.
Beyond this, the race subjected H.W. to various humiliations (including the mis-told story that he did not realize that grocery stores had bar code scanners (he had simply observed that he had not seen a new handheld scanner before) - a fable that captured his patrician distance from ordinary Americans, but that also told an untrue story of a completely out-of-touch and feeble-minded dolt who through the course of his presidency descended to the mental level of his absurd vice president, Dan Quayle), up to and including the final humiliation of losing an election after being the most popular president in the history of polling only a year or so before. This is to say nothing of H.W.’s earlier flip-flopping on his “read my lips: no new taxes pledge,” which is still used as the default example of presidency-defining reversals of policy.
You would have to be a hard soul indeed not be moved, at least on the grounds of nostalgia for a seemingly simpler time, by the handwritten welcome note he left behind for Bill Clinton at the White House. But there are other reasons to feel something about that note. H.W. wrote it at a time when he was doubtless feeling anger at the president-elect and deep sorrow over his own defeat; you don’t have to agree with his politics to understand that he likely had real fears about the fate of the nation at that moment. Sure, he may have been a saint who simply transcended such feelings; far likelier, he was a man who acted against some of his own most profound inclinations and did the right thing in a very difficult moment.
What I am getting at is that we gain nothing by closing ourselves off to the humanity of our political opponents, no matter how nasty we judge their politics, because we begin to close ourselves off from the possibility of persuasion and redemption that are at the heart of a democratic nation. Beyond this, and against the necessity of pushing back against propaganda and the donning of rose-colored glasses about a politician’s record, we need to bear in mind that the political movement in our country dedicated to democracy, racial equality, economic fairness, and tolerance is powerful, and has the force of history and justice on its side. Sometimes it is enough to defeat your opponents; other times it is necessary to kick them around a little when they’re down; but being in the right also means that there is rarely a need to engage in scorched earth put-downs 24 hours within their deaths, even of politicians whose actions had lasting and damaging consequences, as is surely the case with H.W. Viciousness betrays a lack of faith not simply in the rightness of your cause, but in its power and persuasiveness. Those who see the wealthy as the best Americans, who see minorities as not real Americans, and who see democracy as a game to rig and subvert are swimming against a tide more powerful than they can know.
Questions of how to balance political condemnation and righteousness with reconciliation will present themselves to us in force over the next couple of years. An administration that has subordinated the national interest to private gain will have much to answer for, as will a Republican Party that has enabled obscene offenses against American security and democracy. I recently read a critique of the term “the resistance,” and it has continued to resonate with me; the author’s point was that Americans who believe in the rule of law are hardly the resistance, but the true possessors and inheritors of our country’s highest traditions. We are far more powerful that we think, and it does not help to tell ourselves story about the boundless evil of the other side; it makes them seem more powerful than they are, and ourselves, weaker. We are certainly strong enough to strike the right balance between truth-telling and magnanimity, particularly in the face of a former president’s death. Many of George H.W. Bush’s actions surely merit our condemnation and criticism, but this doesn’t mean he also doesn’t deserve our compassion, respect for the good things he accomplished, and, if not now then eventually, forgiveness for the bad.