George H. W. Bush - MSN Encarta

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Introduction; Early Life; Early Political Career; President of the United States; Return to Private Life

Vice President

As vice president, Bush received a valuable eight years of on-the-job training for the presidency. Bush focused on his strongest interest, foreign policy, traveling to Africa, the Middle East, South America, the USSR, Asia, and Central America. Some of these trips were undoubtedly symbolic, but others were not, and Bush used each trip to meet foreign diplomats on whom he would later rely. He employed the same device at home, crossing the country on various political missions for Reagan and building a list of political contacts who would be called on later to help with Bush's own presidential campaign.

Reagan's policies, however, often tested Bush's loyalty. As president, Reagan cut taxes, especially for higher-income individuals and corporations, and approved the biggest peacetime increase in military spending. Budget deficits (the annual gap between tax revenues and expenditures) soared and the national debt, after accounting for inflation, more than doubled in eight years. As Bush had predicted, the “voodoo economics” did not eliminate the deficit, but as vice president he kept his misgivings to himself.

Loyalty to the president also enmeshed Bush in the most damaging scandal of the Reagan years, the revelation in 1986 that while publicly denouncing Iran as a terrorist state, Reagan's foreign policy advisers had secretly sold weapons to Teheran in exchange for the release of U.S. citizens held by pro-Iranian terrorists in Lebanon. More troubling was the disclosure that agents operating under direct White House supervision used profits from the arms sales to buy weapons for the contras, a group of anti-government Nicaraguan rebels, despite an explicit congressional ban on such aid. Bush later claimed that he opposed the arms-for-hostages deal, but offered little evidence to back his claims (see Iran-Contra Affair).

1988 Presidential Election

While the Reagan-Bush program helped produce prosperity for the wealthiest Americans, the economic benefits of the 1980s were spread far less evenly among middle- and working-class Americans. So when Bush launched his 1988 bid for the Republican presidential nomination, he promised to extend the benefits to all Americans and engineer what he called a “kinder, gentler America” in the process. In the early primaries, Bush quickly eliminated his two chief rivals for the Republican nomination, Senate Republican leader Robert Dole of Kansas and Christian television evangelist Pat Robertson. He promised to veto any attempt to increase income taxes with a stirring pledge made to voters in New Hampshire: “Read my lips: No new taxes.” Bush named U.S. senator Dan Quayle, a young Indiana Republican and a favorite of conservatives, to be his running mate.

President of the United States

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Bush lost no time in putting his stamp on the presidency. He was an active president. He came to work early, traveled a great deal, constantly used the telephone to collect information from around the country, and gathered friends and family around him in the evenings. Bush toned down the imperial image that had surrounded the Reagan presidency by jogging every morning around Washington, ordering his motorcade to stop at traffic lights, and appearing before reporters at frequent press conferences. First Lady Barbara Bush talked about her fake pearl necklace and her inability to lose weight. The result was great popularity for the new president.

Domestic Affairs

Bush's most dramatic departure from the Reagan years was his oft-spoken belief that government was not the enemy. Executing a series of small changes from the Reagan years, Bush tried to put in place the kinder and gentler politics for which he had campaigned. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 lowered legal and physical obstacles to citizens with disabilities and was one of the most sweeping pieces of civil-rights legislation in a decade. After the scandals of the Reagan years, Bush spoke often about the need for integrity in government. Behind the scenes, he quietly worked to increase federal spending for education, child care, and advanced technology research and development. He also signed into law a measure to improve the nation's interstate highway system and battled Congress on a crime bill to help police bring criminals to justice. After eight years of environmental disregard under Reagan, Bush moved swiftly in his first year to reauthorize the Clean Air Act, which established higher standards for air quality and required cleaner burning fuels. The reauthorization reflected an agreement between business interests and environmentalists that had eluded the federal government for years.

Bush also moved quickly to save a collapsing savings and loan industry. In 1980 and 1982 Congress had tried to help the financially troubled banking industry with legislation that allowed savings and loan associations to make riskier investments than they had previously been permitted. After the new laws were passed, more than 1000 savings and loan associations went bankrupt due to combinations of poor banking practices, poor government regulation, and outright corruption. In February 1989 Bush released a comprehensive plan to bail out the industry, and Congress reacted rapidly, rewriting oversight regulations and creating the Resolution Trust Corporation to take over bankrupt savings and loan associations and sell off their assets. Ultimately the bailouts cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.

Reagan's economic legacy was perhaps the biggest challenge Bush faced. By 1990 the federal budget deficit had swelled to $220 billion a year, three times its 1980 level. The total federal debt had increased to $3.2 trillion, more than three times that of ten years before. Bush believed that the incomes and standard of living of most Americans would not increase (and the United States would not be able to play a leading role in world affairs) if its economy was built on a foundation of debt.

As a result, in 1990 Bush launched an effort to persuade Congress to bring the deficit under control, but found it difficult to build a consensus acceptable to both Democrats and to conservatives in the Republican Party. Many Democrats in Congress believed tax increases on the wealthy were the best solution to the deficit. Conservative Republicans, by contrast, believed that the deficit could be cured only through deep and sustained cuts in federal domestic spending. Finding an acceptable compromise would have been difficult for any president; for Bush, who never enjoyed the trust of his party's powerful conservative wing, it proved nearly impossible.

In the debate over the budget, Bush's Democratic rivals in Congress consistently outmaneuvered him. First, they forced him to agree to sign a statement calling for tax revenue increases, before negotiations over budget details began. Bush apparently did not perceive that many would see the statement as a repudiation of his most celebrated campaign promise (“no new taxes”), and when word of his agreement was made public, many Republicans felt betrayed. When the Democrats and Bush agreed a few months later to a historic package of spending cuts and tax increases that reduced the deficit by $500 billion over five years, angry Republican conservatives took revenge, abandoning the president and defeating the budget bill in the House of Representatives. Bush had to scramble to reassemble a measure that could win a majority, and to do so he had to accept almost all the Democrats' demands, including higher taxes and more spending. In popularity polls his approval rating slipped 20 points in one six-week period in late 1990. He would later say that the budget deal was a mistake and that he wished he had never agreed to it.

The unpleasant conclusion of the budget deal coincided with the onset of a mild recession in late 1990 that would last for only six months but linger in the public mind for nearly two years. Bush's third year in office was marked by a wave of corporate reorganizations that caused permanent layoffs of white-collar workers. Many of the newly unemployed were independents and Republicans, who had believed that their jobs were secure. At the same time the recession deprived Bush of the little credit he had achieved for the deficit-cutting deal. During the recession, federal spending on welfare and other government programs increased, wiping out much of the savings the budget deal had promised.

In 1991 Bush proposed a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the United States, Mexico, and Canada, which would lower or eliminate tariffs on trade between the three nations. The proposal, favored by Canada and Mexico, was designed to help North America compete against the growing free-trade zones of Europe and Asia. The agreement was eventually taken up by his successor, Bill Clinton, and ratified by the U.S. Congress in November 1993.

After two years, Bush had reached the end of his agenda for domestic legislation. His advisers told him that he had done everything necessary to guarantee his reelection. The recession would pass in a short period and, they told him, the public would reward him for his prudent guidance. Bush admitted that he found domestic policy unpleasant and troublesome and preferred to wrestle with foreign policy. At a press conference in October 1990 Bush said that he found foreign policy more enjoyable.

Foreign Affairs

Panama

Bush was more active in foreign policy than he was in domestic legislation. In December 1989 Bush sent 24,000 troops to Panama to assist military forces in a coup against Panamanian President Manuel Noriega. Noriega had been indicted in the United States for drug trafficking in February 1988, and in May 1989 he had nullified a presidential vote after U.S. observers argued that he had lost. The invasion underscored Bush's opposition to the illegal narcotics trade, but Bush's critics pointed out that Noriega had been an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for years, including the time when Bush had been CIA director. The invasion in the last week of December 1989 lasted less than a week, leaving 23 U.S. soldiers and between 500 and 600 Panamanian soldiers and civilians dead. In January 1990, Noriega was captured and flown to the United States where he was convicted in Miami, Florida, on drug and racketeering charges in April 1992. The United States promised Panama $1 billion to repair the damage caused by the invasion and by economic sanctions that had preceded it.