Former Vice President Dick Cheney was just the latest Republican to endorse Kamala Harris for President over the weekend. However, his former boss has remained woefully quiet on the subject.
With the Clintons and Obamas openly campaigning for Harris, the right move for George W. Bush would be to give a full-throated endorsement of Donald Trump. Don’t hold your breath, but this quote from finance titan David Rubinstein’s new book might be the closest we’ll ever get.
The book, which features interviews with former presidents and historians, offers a quote from Bush where he looks back on his handling of the financial crisis and how it led to rise of American populism:
I listened to [Treasury Secretary] Paulson and [Federal Reserve Chairman] Bernanke and spent your money to bail out the guys who created the instruments in the first place, which is an absolute political disaster,” Bush said. “You wonder why populism is on the rise. It starts with taking taxpayers’ money and giving it to the powerful. It really irritated a lot of Americans, and they haven’t gotten over it yet. That’s just part of it; there’s a lot of other reasons why. But we’ve had candidates say, “You’re mad, I’m going to make you madder.” As opposed to, “You’re mad, I have some solutions to make you less mad.” We’re kind of in the madder stage, where people are exploiting the anger as opposed to dealing with it like leaders should.
What a mensch: Bush is basically saying the buck stops with him. He was pressured into the ’08 bailouts against his better instincts, and now in hindsight realizes that it was the wrong move. The only way to make people “less mad” is to actually offer “solutions” to the problems that he now admits his administration caused.
Rubinstein about says as much in an interview with Semafor about the book:
George W. Bush, although he went to Harvard Business School, was not basically a Wall Street fan, needless to say. And when the financial crisis came, he couldn’t believe that his Secretary of Treasury and everybody were telling him, Ben Bernanke, that they have to do this kind of bailout, because he thought this is basically bailing out the banks for the mistakes they made. But eventually he became convinced that if he didn’t do that, the economy would collapse . . . Though I think George Bush’s Midland Texas instincts were the opposite of what his administration actually did.”
Bush, like Cheney and all other anti-Trump Republicans, is a creature of the post-Cold War establishment, but he’s good ol’ Texas boy at heart. He can’t outright endorse Trump and still walk away with the same legacy — at least not within the swampy world he inhabits. However, admitting he was wrong and that the status quo won’t hold is about the best we can hope for. Obama, Biden, Harris, the legacy Republicans in Congress — all offer but a slight variation of the country Bush handed off in 2009. There’s only one man in America who offers real change and real solutions.
