Last of the breed

George H.W. Bush was the last establishment

The passing of George Herbert Walker Bush, our nation’s 41st president, is an occasion for praise, not only of the man, but all he represented.

Mr. Bush was what we used to call a moderate Republican. Although he lived in Texas and was briefly a congressman from a district there, he was really an Eastern establishment Republican, whose father was a U.S. senator from Connecticut and whose soul was in Maine.

He believed there was a positive role for government in our lives. He was an internationalist. He lost the GOP presidential nomination to Ronald Reagan in 1980 and it is arguable that he would not have been nominated in 1988 had Reagan not made him his vice president.

He was also a man who knew government. This country elected a man president in 2008 who had four years in the U.S. Senate and was previously a state legislator. In 2016, we elected a man who held no elective or appointive office of any kind prior to the presidency.

The first President Bush had been, prior to his presidency, a congressman, ambassador to China, GOP national chairman, ambassador to the U.N., head of the CIA and vice president. He had perhaps the best resume in the history of the presidency.

George Herbert Walker Bush was the last establishment president. No matter what else happened, no matter what mistake he might make, we knew he knew the ropes and that the federal government was in safe hands.

Mr. Bush never promised to bring back hope or restore American greatness or otherwise remake the national psyche, and he was the last of the breed in this respect, too. All he promised us was competence and decency, both of which delivered.

It should have been enough. But it wasn’t then and it surely isn’t now.

There is a downside to the America political establishment. It gave us, in due course, a remote government, deaf and blind to huge swaths of the American public, geographically and sociologically. It gave us a trade policy and a so-called global economy that destroyed much of middle and small-town America. And the country eventually sent the establishment packing, though maybe not for good.

President Bush also was a bona fide war hero and a totally civilized human being. It is a solid bet that history will treat him well, as will his maker.