Today, the late George H.W. Bush’s presidency is remembered quite fondly. One reason, I believe, is that he was the last president to lose re-election. Most people would cite his own missteps as the reason for that.
As former Democratic Texas governor Ann Richards said of him in her 1988 convention speech, Poppy Bush “was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” The turn of phrase might seem more appropriately applied to his son, George W., but it’s impossible to discuss the father’s presidency without remembering his own gaffes.
In the time since Bush’s short presidency, the consultants’ focus-grouping and the politicians’ manipulation of human emotion (both the Bill Clinton kind of manipulation and the very different, little-explored Donald Trump kind of manipulation) have become vastly more sophisticated. Today, the elder Bush’s lack of slick political skill is actually something for which he is rightly and fondly remembered.
The best incident, in my opinion, was the subtlest. It came at a town hall in Exeter, N.H., on Jan. 15, 1992. Bush was asked about the recession that had recently begun, and he replied, “Message: I care.” The origin of this phrase was a cue card that aides had given him as a private reminder to speak in an empathetic way. As an expression of empathy, it was rather ridiculous.
Of course, the fact that such a note had to be given to Bush at all signaled that his campaign perceived an empathy problem in its candidate, and that kind of story has a way of feeding itself.
On another occasion, Bush was severely (and unfairly) criticized for his wonderment at a supermarket scanner. Scanners weren’t exactly new technology at the time, and the implication was that Bush was out of touch with ordinary people’s concerns:
This treatment was, again, quite unfair, and most people in the media understood that at the time. As Snopes notes:
“Bush had good reason to express wonder: He wasn’t being shown then-standard scanner technology, but a new type of scanner that could weigh groceries and read mangled and torn bar codes.”
Unfortunately, though, this reinforced an existing prejudice about Bush — one that wasn’t completely unjustified — and so it stuck. Some news outlets and news commentators (Chris Matthews included above) still misappropriate the incident to this day.
At the risk of giving some aid and comfort to the practitioners of identity politics, I feel safe in saying that it takes more charm than usual for a wealthy New England patrician, a Yale Skull-and-Bones guy from the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant stock, to relate to ordinary working people. Bush had charm, but he sure wasn’t Bill Clinton, and that really comes out in this debate clip:
You may recall that Bush was also knocked for looking at his watch during this debate. The implication was that he felt he was above the whole thing and wanted to be elsewhere. In fact, he felt that Clinton was being given more time than he was supposed to be allowed. Either way, the short segment above shows how Bush was outclassed, as almost any mere mortal would when matching up against Clinton’s innate political skills.
Bush certainly wasn’t charmless. If you bother to go beyond the stereotypes and watch a few of his campaign speeches, you see that he was actually quite capable of self-deprecating humor and warmth. But yes, he lacked the magic touch of Clinton, and that of Ronald Reagan, and perhaps even the common touch of his Texas-raised son, George W.
Poppy Bush was pretty thoroughly and unfairly abused for being out of touch in his day, but by now, his political missteps have grown on the country and become truly endearing. May he rest in peace, and may perpetual light shine upon him.
