George H W Bush was no Donald Trump ... but he was all too much like other Republicans under Trump
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The news this morning is full of praise for George H. W. Bush. So … here’s some more. He was once right, about one thing, before he quit being right about even that. By 1980, the 56-year-old Bush had been a Congressman, U.N. ambassador under Nixon, chaiGeorge H W Bush was no Donald Trump ... but he was all too much like other Republicans under Trump
The news this morning is full of praise for George H. W. Bush. So … here’s some more. He was once right, about one thing, before he quit being right about even that. By 1980, the 56-year-old Bush had been a Congressman, U.N. ambassador under Nixon, chair of the Republican National Committee, and Director of the CIA under Ford—with a few breaks in which he sat on the board of banks and ‘institutes’ always ready to give a Republican politician a soft landing outside of D.C. He decided to run for president years in advance and carefully attended every possible event to lay the groundwork, expecting to simply out-hustle his main rivals in the traditional wing of the party, including Howard Baker, Bob Dole, and John Anderson. When it came to upstart Ronald Reagan, Bush regarded him as a dangerous outsider to the party. Reagan campaigned on a platform of racism, talking about imaginary “welfare queens” who deliberately had more children so they could use the money provided them by hard-working Americans to buy a Cadillac. Reagan derided government not just as part of the problem, but the source of the problem, promising to slash regulations and run America “like a business.” He blasted environmental concerns, denied that acid rain was a problem, scoffed at efforts by Jimmy Carter to encourage conservation, threatened to destroy the Environmental Protection Agency, and promised to open public lands to more drilling. And Reagan ran on a radical new economic policy, one that said if only America would do more to reward rich people, the money would “trickle down” to the poor. He promised that his policy would generate so much money, that he would within a year produce the first balanced budget since 1969. It was on the economics issue in particular that Bush stood up to Reagan. He declared the Laffer Curve — the napkin scrawl on which so-called supply-side economics was founded — to be a joke. He said flatly that the proposal to cut taxes for those at the top as a means of promoting the economy “will not work.” Most notably, he re-labeled Reagan’s mystical promise that allowing the wealthy to pay less in taxes, would actually generate greater revenue “voodoo economics.” And it worked. At least to the extent that Bush won the Iowa caucuses. Reagan retreated to New Hampshire to build a firewall. And that’s were Bush ran into a trap. Read more