President George H.W. Bush dies at 94

George H.W. Bush was an extraordinary president responsible for his historic accomplishments that are often neglected because of the arbitrary way we consider presidential legacies.

His passing, at the age of 94 on Friday, November 30th, is an excellent time to remember his accomplishments and take a deeper view of his career when he and his sons were working in presidential politics. He was both the last president of the generation that served in World War II and one of the last politically influential pragmatists in the Republican Party.

Bush was a president who aimed for satisfactory management rather than ideological transformation. He had a cautious viewpoint, but in hindsight, his presidency was characterized by acts of political courage.

A little over a year ago, a darker side of the elder Bush emerged. Seven women came forward individually to describe similar accounts of Bush groping or grabbing them inappropriately while taking photographs. The accusations are as recent as 2016 and date back to 1992 when a woman said Bush grabbed her rear end while taking a photo at a fundraiser for his re-election campaign. Another woman said she was 16 when Bush, then 79, did something similar to her.

These accusations were not addressed publicly or reported at the time Bush was in office. He lost his reelection in 1992 and became an ideological outcast — too moderate to be beloved as a champion of lost causes and too politically failed to be celebrated as a sharp operator.

Yet his downfall had little to do with anything under his control. A presidential policy is significant economically, but presidents have limited influence over the short-term ups and downs of the business cycle. He was done in by a sluggish economic recovery deliberately engineered by a Federal Reserve that, somewhat outrageously, was pursuing a policy of "opportunistic deflation" that hurt the financial interests of middle-class Americans.

Millions of Americans experienced unnecessarily long spans of joblessness and inactive job growth as a result, and Bush himself became a victim of this policy, which sent him into a spiral of uncertainty.

It's the economy stupid
"I don’t think anybody around the table wants a recession or is seeking one, but sooner or later, we will have one," stated Philadelphia Federal Reserve Bank President Edward Boehne at a 1989 meeting of the Fed's Open Market Committee.

"If in that recession we took advantage of the anti-inflation impetus and we got inflation down from 4.5 percent to 3 percent, and then in the next cycle we were able to keep inflation from accelerating ... we could bring inflation down from cycle to cycle just as we let it build up from cycle to cycle, that would be considerable progress over what we've done in other periods in history."

Boehne was suggesting a strategy known as "opportunistic disinflation," and it killed Bush's political fortunes.

The premise of opportunistic disinflation was that Paul Volcker's achievement in reducing inflation from the double-digit levels of the 1970s to the 4 percent or so rate that predominated during the Reagan administration wasn't enough. Though 4 percent inflation wasn't so wrong as to be worth intentionally provoking a recession over, the Fed should try to get it lower. The best way to do it was to simply wait for the next recession to hit, and then, instead of promoting the quickest reasonable recovery, let the recovery go a bit on the slow side — thus carrying down the inflation rate.

And it worked.

Disruptions linked with the Gulf War threw the economy into recession around the middle of Bush's term in office. The economy eventually improved but did so at a lower rate of inflation than had prevailed before the war.

A political orphan
In politics, nothing succeeds quite like victory. Bush's approach has dropped into dissatisfaction with the constant movement in part because of real ideological disloyalties. But nobody ever governs as a true ideological purist. Ronald Reagan raised taxes and withdrew American troops from Lebanon. George W. Bush added a costly new entitlement to Medicare.

But Bush negotiated and then he failed, giving succor to every ideologue's loving dream, that the path to electing glory lies in adherence to the genuine faith.

What finally brought Bush down was the economy — as the team that beat him well knew. But taxes and war are compelling, and the Federal Reserve is boring. So Bush became an ideological pariah, and the GOP has become a dogmatically anti-tax party, even as his sons continue to be among its leading politicians.