Some presidential reputations are like great red wines: They get better with time. There is no modern president about whom this is more true than the one we lost Friday, George Herbert Walker Bush. Twenty-six years ago, when he ran for re-election, Bush received the lowest percentage of the vote of any incumbent since William Howard Taft in 1912. He had been rejected by the American people and felt it. At the dawn of the Clinton years, our national memory of Bush was of an awkward, aging jogger who was throwing up sushi on state visits and seemed to be amazed by grocery checkout scanners. The impression was very unfair—especially the misreported incident at the checkout counter—but the image stuck. In comparison with Ronald Reagan, whom Bush had served as vice president for eight years, and Bill Clinton, who beat Bush with the help of the candidacy of Ross Perot in 1992, “Poppy” Bush seemed to lack the stature for 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. How wrong that impression was.
from Slate Articles https://ift.tt/2RsKaNN
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