The nice guy in American politics who finished first

WASHINGTON: History takes awhile to render judgements, but the arc already is being kind to George Herbert Walker Bush. Particularly in foreign policy, the achievements of the 41st American president, nicknamed Bush 41 to distinguish him from his son, George W Bush, No. 43, are widely recognised today.

What will preclude him from being considered one of the foremost US presidents is his failure to win re-election. One-term presidents tend to suffer in rankings by reputable historians.

Bush, a Republican, is celebrated by Democrats and Republicans for his personal charm and integrity. He was an inclusive man and had little time for haters. This helps explain why there’s no mutual respect between the Bush family and President Donald Trump.

The Bushes, led by the late president’s son, George W Bush, will minimise any role Trump plays at his funeral, while adhering to a protocol that makes it impossible to exclude an ex-president.

With time, a greater appreciation has developed of accomplishments than seemed less apparent when he left the White House in 1993. He and his secretary of state, James Baker, managed the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold war with skill.

He gets high marks for the first Gulf War, fought in 1991 after Iraq invaded Kuwait. Massive American might was mobilised and a global coalition formed. Saddam Hussein was forced out of Kuwait and weakened. Then the US largely left. It’s impossible not to draw the contrast to the debacle created by his son a dozen years later, when the US toppled Saddam and then occupied Iraq.

His foreign policy team of Baker, Defence Secretary Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft was the best functioning in modern history. This was a culmination of decades of preparation by Bush to become a foreign policy president, starting when he was a naval pilot in World War 2.

His domestic advisers, by contrast, left few footprints, and his inattention to domestic issues dogged his failed 1992 re-election campaign.

His defeat by Bill Clinton made him one of only two incumbents to be denied a second term since World War 2 and validated the famous dictum of Clinton campaign manager, James Carville: ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’

Yet the 1990 Americans With Disabilities Act, supported and signed by Bush, was the most important civilrights measure enacted in a quarter century.

Many economists argue that the prosperity of the Clinton era was facilitated when Bush agreed to a budget-deficit reduction package in 1990. It cut spending, raised taxes and infuriated Republican conservatives. It may also have cost him a second term, though in 2014 it won him a John F Kennedy Profile in Courage Award.

Only two years before, in his acceptance speech to the 1988 Republican National Convention, he had vowed that he would never raise taxes. ‘Read my lips, no new taxes,’ he told cheering delegates. But six months later, on the night before his inauguration, he found himself regretting his signature pledge as the deficit outlook worsened.

He never believed in the supply-side, tax-cut-centric economic theory adopted by his party; he’d labelled it ‘voodoo economics’ during the 1980 Republican presidential primaries. He could also separate governing, where his principles usually prevailed, from electoral politics.