Behind the media's strange love affair with Bush ‘41'

It seems the only good conservative president is either a dead conservative president or one so far removed from office that his political influence is limited. That's the conclusion that can be drawn from the recent media lovefest surrounding George H.W. Bush and, before him, Ronald Reagan.

The sentimental treatment of Bush began a few months back with endearing references to the former president's ... socks. The paeans reached their culmination last month on his 88th birthday.

NBC Nightly News broadcast a sympathetic interview of the 41st president by his granddaughter Jenna Bush Hager. Days later, HBO aired an admiring documentary about Bush's life, 41, produced by longtime friend Jerry Weintraub. A review in Politico said it could "be seen as a love letter from Weintraub to Bush."

What's going on here? Those of us whose memories aren't clouded by love letters can recall a time when Bush wasn't regarded as a genteel statesman. As a presidential candidate, he was condemned as a race-baiter who introduced the nation to Willie Horton. After his election in 1988, a Washington Post editorial described his postelection news conference as "a little like being back in Kansas after a trek through the more nightmarish precincts of Oz."

Bush appointed Clarence Thomas, the justice liberals love to hate, to the Supreme Court. In its endorsement of Bill Clinton in 1992, the Post said Bush had "long since squandered whatever claim he had to national leadership."

The sudden media nostalgia for Bush 41 may simply reflect American generosity. Time tends to smooth the rough edges of partisanship. Bush is a citizen who served his nation in uniform and in civilian life.

Reagan briefly enjoyed similarly sentimental treatment after his death in 2004. Gone, for a while, were the accusations of dog-whistle racism, the insults about senility, and the accusations that homophobia was behind his alleged indifference to the AIDS epidemic — though a more sincere expression was on display last month, when two White House visitors from Philadelphia posed for photos giving the middle finger to Reagan's portrait.

Beyond sentimentality, something else is at work in the media paeans to past GOP presidents. They're an effort to embellish the narrative that today's Republican Party is nothing like the party that had Bush and Reagan as its standard-bearers, that the kinds of compromises that Bush made with Democrats on taxes and Reagan made with them on immigration are anathema to the current crop of Republican leaders. GOP critics even received an unexpected affirmation from Bush's son Jeb, who should know better.

Both Jeb Bush and George H.W. Bush have endorsed Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee and the one candidate whom most tea-party and social conservatives didn't want to win. Romney may yet find his inner Reagan. But how is a party that nominates the former governor of the most liberal state in the Union running off the rails to the right?

About those so-called compromises: Both were based on false pretenses. Bush agreed to raise taxes in 1990 in return for a commitment from Democratic leaders in Congress to cut $2 in spending for every $1 in tax increases. Taxes went up, but the cuts never came.

Reagan agreed to amnesty for illegal immigrants in return for a Democratic commitment to enforce immigration laws. Amnesty was granted, but the enforcement never happened.

Reagan called the deal the worst mistake of his presidency. While nostalgia is fine, Republicans and the nation can do without that kind of one-sided compromise.