How new presidents tend to get clobbered in midterm elections. Gingrich was telling people now that, instead of being stuck in the minority, he would have become speaker and been able to reshape national politics.
Dream on, Newt. To Bush, that seemed like to a whole lot of nonsense. Bush never shied away from tough politics. He was proud of his record as an honorable and principled guy while in office, even if he knew he was sometimes less so when vying for it. A decent man, Dukakis was. Still is. Even if you campaign aggressively, though, Bush knew there had to be limits.
Had to keep it about policy, not personal lives. Besides, where does Gingrich get off talking publicly about bimbo eruptions and all that? Buying full-page ads in the papers, campaigning in New Hampshire, and whatnot.
Good thing that turned out to be just empty talk. Like so much with Trump. Bush had to admit that his first term felt a whole lot more fulfilling than his second one. Amazingly, managing the end of the Cold War and the international coalition that forced Saddam out of Kuwait had turned out to be less soul-sapping than trying to negotiate, over and over, with the obstinate right wing of his own party.
How many times had he sat Gingrich down on that cream-colored sofa over there and tried explaining it all to that son of a so-and-so? Not going to twiddle my thumbs for the next four years while you say no to everything. So Bush had cut a deal with Mitchell and Gephardt that gave millions of poor mothers the kind of training and support they needed to move from welfare to work. In pivoting away from Gingrich and toward bipartisan deals, Bush had been replicating some of his biggest successes from his first term.
Take the Americans With Disabilities Act. Let the old cranks at the diner whine about all the money being wasted on ramps, or all the best parking spaces now being off-limits.
And how proud he was of his work to help keep it that way by signing the Clean Air Amendments back in Having to deal with a Democratic Senate meant that when Bush had the chance to name two more justices to the Supreme Court in his second term, he had no shot of getting another lightning rod like Clarence Thomas through.
Mitchell and Joe Biden assured him that if he chose another moderate like his first appointment, David Souter, the nominee would sail through. Still, Souter seemed like a decent, smart, sensible fella.
Reminded Bush of his own father, a rock-ribbed New England Republican who was star quality in everything he did. No doubt that whole investigation would have withered on the vine if Bush had not been reelected.
Bush had considered pardoning Caspar Weinberger, his pal from the Reagan administration, at the end of his first term, but knew the Democrats would accuse him of obstruction of justice. So he waited until the end of his second term. Bush glanced at his watch. It was getting late. He sealed the letter for his successor and left it on the center of the desk blotter. As he stood up and admired for one last time the luminist landscapes hanging on the Oval Office walls, his son walked in.
Bush said. He wondered what would be next for his son. George W. Nothing more important than loyalty. But being a successful politician took a lot more than that. Bush thought back to his first term, when his son had volunteered to play the enforcer role for his father.
The presidency offers an unrivalled platform to attract airtime, raise campaign funds and set the policy agenda. Sitting presidents, too, tend to escape bruising battles for their party's nomination - although not George HW Bush, who faced a gruelling primary challenge for his place on the Republican ticket from Pat Buchanan.
In addition, they have the rare ability to make a compelling claim - that they know what it is like to take decisions from inside the Oval Office. This carries added contemporary significance after Barack Obama's two terms. Obama's own historical legacy appeared to be as important an election issue as any other, to both the president and his opponents alike, ahead of the ballot.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell famously declared in that his "number-one priority" was to make Obama, a Democrat, a "one-term president". Defenders of Bush, the 41st president, put him in the former category. His time in office coincided with the fall of the Berlin Wall and his popularity soared in the wake of the first Gulf War.
However, a protracted economic recession on his watch saw him break a pledge not to raise taxes, provoking fierce hostility from within his own Republican party. With Ross Perot, a third-party candidate, splitting the vote in the election, Bush's attempts to win re-election were thwarted by the charismatic Bill Clinton. Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, believes Bush was a victim both of timing and the US's system of fixed-term presidencies.
Bush and Bill Clinton told a forum in Dallas on Thursday that they were able to forge mutual bonds of respect and friendship because the other had been gracious in victory and respectful of presidential power. The two did not mention President Donald Trump once during a nearly hour-long discussion where they traded quips and insights.
Bush and the man who defeated him in The connection surprised both men, and astonished many of their longtime aides. Bush would go so far as to suggest more than once that he might be the father that the Bill Clinton had always lacked—a notion that the younger man did not dispute.
Fifty-eight minutes after midnight on December 26, , a tremor erupted thirty miles below the surface in waters off the coast of Sumatra. When the waves came ashore hours later, parts of towns and cities—and their residents—along the coasts of Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand were swept away. The tsunami left more than , dead, tens of thousands missing, and millions homeless.
The sheer number of corpses choked morgues and medical facilities and raised fears of famine and disease. Back in Washington, George W. Bush and his advisors searched for an appropriate way to coordinate and direct the outpouring of aid from private sources, which would quickly dwarf anything governments could bring to bear.
It was the president who came up with the idea of asking his two predecessors to work together. Both were proven fund-raisers in very different realms and both had world-class Rolodexes.
Bush and Clinton were described many times as the Oscar and Felix of American politics, one proper and prudent, the other all appetite and instinct. Their hard-fought campaign had left scars. Bush assumed he was going to win right up to the end and when he lost, took the defeat hard. But Bush the younger had good reason to think, ten years on, that the scars had healed.
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