TWO decades since losing the presidency after a single term, George Bush senior is in fashion. No living ex-president enjoys higher net approval ratings (though his successor, Bill Clinton, comes close). George W. Bush has written a loving book about his father, out in November. Two other books are in the works (one wistfully titled “The Last Gentleman”). They follow admiring television biographies on HBO and PBS.
The establishment cheered Mr Bush’s 90th birthday in June, which the former navy pilot marked with a parachute jump. “Happy 90th to our former boss,” beamed the CIA, tweeting a picture from Mr Bush’s security badge as agency director. Sailors on the USSGeorge H.W. Bush, an aircraft-carrier, formed the message “41=90” on their flight deck. The Republican National Committee (RNC) hailed Mr Bush’s WASP-ish sense of style, selling socks in the vivid colours loved by the ex-president, a “sock man”.
In May the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library gave Mr Bush its “Profile in Courage Award”, casting his 1990 pact with a Democratic-controlled Congress to raise taxes as an act of patriotic self-sacrifice. In the Kennedy library’s telling, Mr Bush put country above his 1988 campaign pledge, “Read my lips: no new taxes”, though that promise-breaking threatened his career.
Political nostalgia is complicated: the collective memory is often fuzzy. Mr Bush’s original tax vow was a desperate bit of pandering that aides knew would haunt him; as the 1992 election neared he called the tax rises a mistake. When voters sigh for a leader they once jeered, they are mostly expressing unhappiness about the present, rather than changing their minds about the past. Clues about modern politics lurk within this Bush boom.
There are many reasons why a man mocked as a buttoned-up toff—for citing his mother’s advice, “Nobody likes a braggadocio, George”, or woodenly assuring a New Hampshire crowd, “Message: I care”—is now praised for his modest reticence and bipartisan dignity. At 90, less of a premium is placed on being in touch. But Mr Bush’s awkward authenticity is also a rare quality in today’s slick, poll-tested, teleprompter politics.
In a partisan age, Mr Bush earns credit for policies that steered between extremes. Start with foreign policy. A generation ago his swift, limited Gulf war left the Right asking why coalition forces had not rolled on to Baghdad and toppled Saddam Hussein. Conservatives and Democrats in Congress grumbled about his handling of the Soviet block’s collapse, faulting him for showing little “elation” as the Berlin Wall fell. “I’m not a very emotional kind of guy,” retorted Mr Bush, who was in fact quietly seeking Russian consent for a unified Germany inside NATO. Today, few ask why he did not take Baghdad and foreign-policy grandees long for a muscular realist like Mr Bush. That is a reaction to George W. Bush’s rashness. But it also reflects anxiety that Barack Obama’s sober doctrine for American power—first, do no harm—has veered into not doing much at all.
The elder Bush steered between other extremes. He increased quotas for family immigration and skilled workers but vowed to deport more foreigners under his “war on drugs”. A former oil man, he passed clean-air laws. He fretted about government spending while defending public service as a calling. Mr Bush visibly disliked the hucksterish business of campaigning (Timothy Naftali, a biographer, once described him looking as unhappy at a debate as a child “dropped off at the wrong birthday party”), yet he let aides run brutal attack ads. He clashed with tribunes of the new Right in Congress, notably Newt Gingrich, the future House speaker, but also railed at “carping little liberal Democrats”.
Nearly 22 years ago the middle way led to defeat, squeezed between Mr Clinton and conservative and populist critics, including the independent presidential candidate Ross Perot. Does surging Bush-nostalgia signal that America would now elect his modern equivalent by a landslide? Oddly enough, no—mainly because he would not be chosen by today’s Republicans.
It is not hard to design a thought experiment, pondering what would happen if the 41st president were 30 years younger and running for office today. For his politics runs through the veins of Jeb Bush, his second son, former governor of Florida and an icon of the Republican Party’s “governing” wing. Establishment types long for Jeb to contest the 2016 presidential election (others might agree with Jeb’s mother, Barbara, that it is time to let other families have a turn, beyond the Kennedys, Clintons and Bushes). But doctrinaire conservatives loathe Jeb for his moderate line on immigration and for supporting the Common Core, national education standards that hardliners call a liberal plot to brainwash kids. Their hostility would make a Jeb Bush candidacy a costly slog. Similar forces obliged another technocratic friend of business, Mitt Romney, to tack rightwards to win the 2012 Republican nomination, hurting him in the general election.
Not his grandfather’s Republican Party
Ask conservatives about those paying tribute to George H.W. Bush—the RNC, the CIA, big TV channels and the Kennedys—and they might struggle to say which they distrust more. Bowing to the times, George P. Bush, Jeb’s son, calls Mr Gingrich a political role model as he campaigns to become Texas land commissioner, his first run for office.
It is conceivable that the presidential candidate closest to the elder Bush could be a Democrat, Hillary Clinton, a wonkish pragmatist and foreign-policy realist—though her best friends could not call authenticity her strong point. Even then, her party’s Left will demand concessions if she runs.
The problem is structural. Centrists still fill big jobs in business and the public sector, but control the beating heart of neither party. Bush-nostalgia is surging in a country stalked by populism. Missing the 41st president is one thing. Reviving the America that could elect someone like him, quite another.