Remember the good old days when "I" wasn't the most important and interesting person in the room?
Okay, Americans aren't all that enthusiastic about Bush 1 or, as Maureen Dowd calls him, "41." But it would be nice if a plague were to drop in on us from outer space, a plague that leaves us with more realistic egos. When it comes to ego, we could use a little time with "Poppy" Bush, the older Bush New York Times columnist Dowd flew to Houston to visit when he did his most recent sky-dive.
...41 can still drive his cherished cigarette boat, Fidelity IV, in Kennebunkport, and he was very much himself over pizza at his favorite Houston dive: racy jokes, no airs, ever gracious.
He spoke fondly of his new pal, Bill Clinton, and highly of President Obama. (His only tart word was reserved for Donald Trump, the birther agitator.)
Bush is so reluctant to use “the big I,” as his mother called displays of ego, that he never even cashed in with a proper presidential memoir. It would have required a sustained first-person singular.
But as he turns 88 this week with a birthday clambake in Kennebunkport and a screening of an admiring HBO documentary, “41,” we are in the midst of what his biographer, Jon Meacham, calls “Poppy chic.”
A new CNN/ORC International poll found that Bush the senior is far more respected than Bush the junior, who is the least popular among the living ex-presidents. ...NYT
The Bush who never grew up made his father look awfully good in comparison, even though he really wasn't. He was the guy who used Willy Horton.
But his son was so bad that Poppy now looks "bipartisan." 41 isn't able to blame his son for being the worst-ever president. He blames Cheney.
He's not entirely wrong. But he doesn't get it right either. As father-son presidents, Poppy and W will live in memory as long as quiz shows last. Neither lives up to the nation's overblown idea of itself. They did a good job, though, of showing us who we really are.
