These were to have been the good old days for George Bush.
According to the Republican script, he should be basking in the afterglow of voter approval this week. He should doing what he most enjoys: managing a crisis in a faraway land.
Instead, even as Bush revels in a last airborne swipe at Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, he is forced to listen to historians and pundits talk about him in the past tense, playing the “failed president, average president, great president” game.
This week there can be little but melancholy for Bush as he cleans out the office that Democrat Bill Clinton will inherit. Watching the president-elect retreat from virtually every one of his campaign promises must amuse Bush, but it certainly can’t comfort him.
Spurned by the voters at home, the departing chief executive contemplates a different sort of new world order abroad, with headlines freighted with tribalism and starvation, and with a slowly dissolving Soviet Union as the centerpiece.
The reversal of Bush’s fortunes is as stunning as any in American political history, and several of his longtime allies contend the president does not yet understand what happened to him.
Nearly two years ago, with a cease-fire declared in the Persian Gulf after the success of Operation Desert Storm, Bush’s re-election-as well as his place in history-seemed assured.
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One year ago this week, not much seemed to have changed in the political landscape, although there were restive voices, especially in New Hampshire. There, a conservative Republican talk-show pundit was trashing the Bush years for an audience of voters slogging through a four-year recession.
During the week he traveled to New Hampshire with his clumsy, “Message: I care,” Bush’s public approval rating had fallen to 50 percent. But he seemed to have no credible political opposition. The Democratic Party looked to be headed the way of the Whigs, and Ross Perot was just another rich Texan trying to get the federal government to help him build a private airport in Ft. Worth.
It all slipped away from Bush, in part through his own blindness to events but also because he aimed to please.
Throughout his term, he mocked what he called “the vision thing,” failing to understand that in 1992 America did not want to be led by an administration that viewed its duties as implementing a foreign policy design and letting the economy take care of itself.
On the campaign trail, he told the voters they could not trust the youthful governor of a largely rural state, an untested liberal tax-and-spender whose personal morality was as questionable as his patriotism.
The voters listened, and they chose not to believe Bush. Or worse, from his perspective, they believed him and chose Clinton anyway.
Last week, in a period devoted to final gestures, Bush suffered a range of indignities, great and small. He had the look of a man bested by his political rivals and abandoned by his supposed allies.
As he fades from the scene, Bush is hearing the sneers of a political party that believes its defeat in November was entirely his responsibility.
Moderates in the Republican Party insist he caved in to the Right and lost the Great Middle, where the voters are; conservatives argue that he failed because he was not true to Ronald Reagan’s legacy, whatever that is.
In a ceremony at the White House last Wednesday, he presented Reagan with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Bush lavished praise on his predecessor, calling him “a true American hero.”
“Ronald Reagan didn’t just make the world believe in America,” Bush continued. “He made Americans believe in themselves. . . . None was more a prophet in his time.”
Demonstrating the gracelessness that has characterized his public relationship with Bush, Reagan offered the obligatory “thanks of a grateful nation” to the man who served him with unflinching loyalty for eight years as vice president, who inherited his deficit, who coughed up the Iran-contra pardons the Gipper had the good sense not to offer his minions.
Basking in his monumental self-absorption, Reagan went on to discuss his own greatness. He told a joke, shed a tear, dazzled the White House press corps, then fled the capital without even staying for lunch.
On Thursday, The Washington Times, a newspaper slavishly devoted to the perpetuation of Reagan mythology, ran a full-color photo of the Reagans under a headline that read, “Last act, last scene.”
George Bush was nowhere in the picture.