Posted on 02/27/2023 9:17:23 AM PST by ChicagoConservative27
Ninety-two-year-old James A. Baker is among America’s most distinguished statesmen. His most significant appointments were as President Reagan’s Treasury secretary and chief of staff and President George H.W. Bush’s secretary of state and closest confidante. Baker also led the legal team in the 2000 election that halted the Florida recount, awarding Bush’s son Florida’s Electoral College votes and the White House.
Among our presidents, no other, including Eisenhower, had a resume comparable to George H.W. Bush. Bush had been CIA director; a member of Congress; ambassador to China and the United Nations; and one of the Navy’s youngest fighter pilots in World War II, where who won a Distinguished Flying Cross and Purple Heart. And he had been Reagan’s vice president for eight years.
With those qualifications and a brilliant first term, I wonder what Baker might consider the global consequences of Bush’s loss to Bill Clinton in 1992. Suppose Bush had won and had gotten four more years. Would today’s world be different?
Bush presided over arguably the greatest peaceful transformation of the 20th century: the implosion of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in 1991. The Bush team was superb. Baker was at State. General Brent Scowcroft was serving for the second time as national security advisor. A youngish Dick Cheney was at the Pentagon. General Colin Powell was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And Scowcroft’s deputy, Robert Gates, took over the CIA in 1991. That was a formidable team.
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
True, but don’t forget that he also gave us David Souter and the ADA.
It was all the same neocons that eventually moved over to the Democrat Corporate wing. So...no difference.
If 41 didn't fold up like a corn tortilla and agree to D*mocrat tax hikes, no Ross P, and no Clinton.
;>)
Souter was a disaster and he’s gone. Clarence Thomas is a treasure and he’s still with us.
HAHAH that made me laugh
Unlike Democrat peacenik Clinton, Bush would have leveraged NATO to bomb Serbia and support the establishment of the Islamic state of Kosovo in the Balkans.
Oh, wait a minute ...
Among our presidents, no other, including Eisenhower, had a resume comparable to George H.W. Bush. Bush had been CIA director; a member of Congress; ambassador to China and the United Nations; and one of the Navy’s youngest fighter pilots in World War II, where who won a Distinguished Flying Cross and Purple Heart. And he had been Reagan’s vice president for eight years.”
This is such total bull$hi*.
He held most of those positions for only a few months. He was completely unqualified to serve as VP. When he ran for President (against Reagan) it was unthinkable that someone so utterly inexperienced could actually be elected.
It is just the fact that he was a CIA lifer that he was able to wiggle onto the ticket.
As far as other Presidents having had better experience, I would note as a starter for this historically illiterate author I would note our first six Presidents.
Then I would direct the author to TR.
And plenty of others.
The truth is that Bush is one of the least qualified we have ever had. Only VP prepared him and he was lucky to get that.
The only reason Clinton even got the democrat nomination was Bush’s sky-high approval ratings immediately after the first Gulf War. None of the A-list democrats wanted to run, leaving the democrat field open to C-list losers like Clinton and Tsongas.
By the general election, Bush’s approval ratings had plummeted. Then with Perot taking almost 20% of the popular vote (almost entirely from Bush), Clinton got elected with only 43% of the vote.
I never cared for Bush, but he would have been better than Clinton.
The author forgot to mention that three international news organizations re-counted EVERY ballot in Florida, and George W. Bush still won the state by a small margin.
Absolutely right - and one of the biggest mistakes the second President Bush ever made was NOT nominating Justice Thomas to be Chief Justice.
I voted for Perot
Our intellectual culture is reactionary toward Republican presidents and has been this way since Lincoln.
Bush was President in 1992 and did little about the fighting in the former Yugoslavia. Clinton became President in 1993 and did little about the fighting in the former Yugoslavia for nearly three years, until the fall of 1995. Was he mainly acting to prevent the war in Bosnia from becoming a political liability for him in the 1996 election? If Bush had been re-elected in 1992, he wouldn’t have been a candidate in 1996.
Clinton also sat on his hands when the Rwandan Holocaust was happening.
Interesting speculation but there’s no way to know what would have happened.
I’ve heard similar speculation about what if President Kennedy had never been assassinated. Supposedly Kennedy would not have severely escalated the war in Vietnam the way Johnson did.
And I’ve heard speculation, what if Nixon had not been brought down.
Then , there is speculation that Jimmy Carter never could have won election, except for running in the post Watergate environment, and running against a weak incumbent in President Ford.
Biden and others made Clarence Thomas’ confirmation a real nightmare and they would have been up to their usual tricks if Bush had tried to elevate Thomas to Chief Justice. Thomas probably would have told him “thanks, but no thanks.”
If Nixon had won in 1960, he might have handled the crises of the 1960s better than JFK or LBJ did (Bay of Pigs, situation in Vietnam, civil rights). Would Khrushchev have given the OK for the East Germans to build the Berlin Wall? He did so after judging Kennedy a weakling after meeting him in Vienna. The space program might have gone on with the same speed (but without the artificial deadline of Dec. 31, 1969, to get a man on the moon.
This is a stupid article.
Clinton was perhaps the only person who could have stopped the Rwandan genocide from happening...but he didn’t need to bother since the black vote would be his anyway.
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