The death of George H.W Bush provokes some reflections, not on politics so much as on propriety. He came from wealth and never quite managed the common touch. Blots on his escutcheon include choosing to hire the gutter fighter Lee Atwater whose race-baiting Willie Horton ad and attack on Kitty Dukakis’s mental health helped get him elected.
He also made the expedient promise penned by Peggy Noonan to “read my lips, no new taxes.” This was red meat thought to be required by the post-Reagan Republican base, but Bush knew better. The gullible Gipper’s supply side economics was running up gigantic deficits that would have to be addressed. The promise was wrong, but doing something about them was courageous, even though it helped lose him a second term
Bush also deserves immense credit for navigating with great skill the collapse of the Soviet bloc that Reagan got undeserved credit for, and for assembling an international coalition to push back Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. And for doing so without succumbing to the hubristic overreach that later mired his son in a quagmire without end, alienating longtime allies and emboldening foes.
All that is to the good, but Bush may be most notable for returning the presidency to the kind of personal qualities once expected of it — among them probity, decency, duty, honor, and country. These seemed like an anachronistic throwback to an earlier era after the crude Johnson, the crooked Nixon, the incontinent Clinton and even Reagan, whose amiable facade masked a rather careless disregard for the least among us.
Bush may have been to the manor born, but he was also to good manners bred. His formidable mother taught him the importance of charity, humility, and to use the word “I” very sparingly, a trait that made him ill-suited the the egomaniac business of politics.
He was mocked for his habit of sending handwritten thank you notes to all and sundry, just as he was nicknamed “have half” in prep school for offering reflexively to share his lunch with anyone who sat next to him.
Like Obama more recently, you may not have agreed with the politics of Bush but you surely could have encouraged a child to aspire to the president’s behavior — his kindness, consideration for others, politeness, thoughtfulness. Unfortunately, such admirable traits got Bush called a wimp and Obama far worse, a sign perhaps of the debased times in which we live.
As is the current occupant of the highest office of trust in the land. What kind of lessons did Trump learn from his mother? Is he the sort of role model that any parent would hold up to a child as worthy of emulation? Isn’t he, rather, at the opposite pole — an object lesson in the kind of behavior to avoid?
Once parents warned their children of being consigned to the nether regions for their sins if naughty. Or they were told that the bogeyman would get them if they didn’t behave. Or that Santa would bring them a lump of coal instead of goodies. Children were encouraged to act like well bred people, ladies and gentlemen, in fact, not ill-mannered louts.
Today, millions of parents are probably, unfortunately, telling children who lie, unruly children who throw tantrums if they don’t get their way, not to act like Trump. Greedy, uncharitable, selfish, ‘me first’ children are surely warned not to act like “The Donald.”
Kids who are not team players, who won’t study and learn their lessons, who blame other people for their errors, who bully the weak, who act tough but run for cover when challenged by bigger bullies, are surely being told —- “Jimmy, Susie, please stop acting so Presidential!
The Trump example can’t help but make George H.W. Bush appear to have been a paragon, a role model all Americans can admire. We are right to mourn the loss of exemplars of such old-fashioned public and private virtues as rectitude, integrity, and, yes, noblesse oblige.