“Few presidents have entered the Oval Office with as much opportunity for positive change as did George Bush. Certainly, no previous president ever ascended to the presidency with the future of the country so critically in the balance. Yet, Bush left the White House having failed to lead the country, having failed to grasp the opportunities that lay before him…

“As leader of his party… Bush had an obligation to bring into the national spotlight the next generation of national Republican leaders. Not only did he fail, utterly, in that responsibility, he has left in his wake a youthful Democratic administration that may well dominate the national political scene for the next sixteen years…”

George W. Bush? No, those paragraphs are excerpted from a February 25, 1993 op-ed column that I wrote for The Tulsa Sentinel, expressing my views on the outgoing president, George H.W. Bush.

Early in his presidency, George H.W. Bush attempted to continue the Reagan policy of less government spending and reduced taxes. And when he failed to get the necessary cooperation from House and Senate Democrats he agreed to an “economic summit” on neutral ground at Andrews Air Force Base. At that meeting, congressional Democrats agreed to spending cuts if Bush would agree to some limited tax increases… mostly increases in federal user fees.

When they came to his desk Bush signed the tax bills and sat back to await the spending cuts, but they never came; the Democrats reneged on their end of the bargain. In spite of his many years in public life… as a member of Congress, as Ambassador to the United Nations, as Chairman of the Republican National Committee, as Director of Central Intelligence, as U.S. Envoy to China, and as Vice President… Bush apparently learned little about the true nature of Democrats. Like his son, George W., he actually believed that there were honorable men and women on the Democratic side of the aisle who could be trusted to honor their commitments.

When Bush ran for reelection in 1992, Democrats added insult to injury by flailing him with his 1988 “Read my lips… no new taxes” pledge. And while he had a perfect response available to him, he simply ignored the story of the Democrats’ economic summit treachery. True to the Bush family motto which says that, in politics, points are awarded for being nice to the guy who’s trying to destroy you, he simply turned the other cheek… and lost the election.

The Bushes apparently fail to understand that, when they are viciously and unfairly attacked, all those who’ve supported them and stood by them feel just as grievously injured.

After eight years of Clintons in the White House, George W. Bush won the 2000 Republican nomination by insisting that he was a “compassionate” conservative… further evidence that, not only did he not understand what conservatism was all about, his years of exposure to his father’s brand of “conservatism” failed to inform him that true conservatives would be insulted by the implication that they were somehow not compassionate human beings.

Bush entered the White House in January 2001 with the opportunity to do great things, not only for the people of America, but for the Republican Party as well. He performed well in the global War on Terror and for eight years he kept us safe from terrorist attack, although his efforts to rally the people to what is a noble cause in Afghanistan and Iraq were half-hearted, at best.

He made two exceptional appointments to the Supreme Court, with the inexplicable Harriet Myers fiasco sandwiched in between. Unlike his father, who contributed the liberal David Souter to the Court, George W. left the Court more conservative than he found it.

When Hurricane Katrina struck the Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi Gulf coasts, the Mayor of New Orleans and the Governor of Louisiana, both Democrats, failed miserably in their roles as first responders. And when tens of thousands of New Orleans residents were left to fend for themselves by a corrupt mayor and an incompetent governor, Democrats charged that it was Bush who had abandoned them… ostensibly because they were mostly black Democrats. Bush tacitly took the blame and fired his FEMA director as proof of his remorse.

Having worked cooperatively with Democrats in Austin during his years as Governor, Bush was under the misapprehension that he could do the same in Washington. Unfortunately, he had not stared evil in the face until he met the likes of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Bush apparently felt that Reid would be very much like other Mormons: kind, decent, and honorable. It never occurred to him that Harry Reid was living proof that even rattlesnakes can be Mormons.

And although he enjoyed Republican majorities in both houses of Congress for most of his two terms, he was plagued by the most incompetent sort of leadership… particularly in the House of Representatives where Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) presided over a Republican majority that worked very hard at making themselves indistinguishable from Democrats. In refusing to use his veto pen on the GOP spending binge, Bush failed to provide the political leadership necessary to force or cajole congressional Republicans back into line with traditional Republican principles.

But the greatest sin of the Bushes, father and son, is what they have done to the Republican Party. During the Clinton years, few major decisions were ever made without first considering the impact on the Democratic Party. During the Bush years, the fortunes of the party that elected them were rarely, if ever, a consideration. And when the political rough-and-tumble demanded toughness… an eye for an eye… there was no fight in them. When faced with the sheer malice of Democratic opposition they simply slinked away, their tails tucked firmly between their legs.

The Bushes and the Republicans in Congress inherited a strong conservative tide, created for them by the determined activists who nominated Barry Goldwater in 1964 and who shepherded Ronald Reagan all the way to the White House in 1980. A reader in Texas has described the Bushes and today’s congressional Republicans as being like lazy cows in a pasture who eat all the lush green grass, leaving behind only… the ugly remains.

Watching the Bushes, one gets the impression that it’s always just about them… party interests be damned. When asked to take ten minutes out of his schedule to pose for a photograph with the eight Oklahoma electors of the 2000 Electoral College, Bush refused. These were 8 of the 271 electors who gave him a slim two vote margin in the Electoral College; whose names, addresses, and telephone numbers were published on the Internet; but who lived up to their electoral oaths despite months of obscene middle-of-the-night phone calls and death threats.

The Bushes are Ivy League elitists in ten-gallon hats who never seemed to know, or care, who their friends were; they were both nice guys, playing in an arena where being nice to the likes of Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi doesn’t count for much. So is it any wonder that, because of their failure to lead, politically, they leave behind a party that is dispirited, a smoldering ruin, a party that not even the most ardent Republican partisan is able to defend? That is their legacy.

When defending the Bush record it is not enough to say that they did some things right, when in fact there were many more things that they could have accomplished… but didn’t. So goodbye, George Bush… and let’s all hope that Jeb doesn’t get any bright ideas.