Who Was The Us President In 1989 And 1990

Was George H.W. Bush a good president?

Yes and no.Bush 41 was eminently qualified to be the President. He was a former director of the CIA, he was ambassador to the UN and to China, a two-term Representative from Texas, and for eight years, was a successful and active part of the Reagan Administration as the Vice-President. That he easily won the election to succeed Reagan as President wasn’t a shocker.His problem was, put simply, that while Reagan was the right man at the right time in 1980, Bush wasn’t the right man in 1988. I wrote about this subject in a response to another question: John Cate's answer to Is the conservative era that started with the election of Ronald Reagan over? Without making you read that, the main issue is that people miss the most important aspect of the Reagan Presidency—they focus on the social conservatism, and miss the point that it was more about foreign affairs. Reagan’s policies were the ones that brought the Cold War to a successful conclusion. It didn’t happen until after he’d left office—Bush had already been President for 10 months when the Berlin Wall fell—but the policies that made it happen were Reagan’s, along with those of our allies in Europe. Bush, who knew a lot about the Soviets from his other jobs, played a role in shaping those policies, too.But the world changed in 1989 and 1990, and Bush 41 was thrust into a new era. He was Winston Churchill after V-E Day, a man for another time. He was still 100 percent capable and competent, and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait gave him a chance to show himself at his best. If that had happened a year later, Bush likely would have won a second term. But it didn’t, and after a decade of expansion, the economy went into a recession. Bush mishandled this situation six ways to Sunday. This sort of thing wasn’t his strong suit, and he didn’t get good advice from those he surrounded himself with. Plus, he didn’t have a George Bush as his VP, he had Dan Quayle.Bill Clinton was a fresh face after 12 years of Reagan and Bush, and he wasn’t the same type of liberal Democrat that they had swamped in 1984 and 1988. Having offered ideas for getting the country out of the recession better than Bush did, and not being so liberal as to be unpalatable to moderate voters, he beat Bush in 1992. Clinton, as it turned out, was also the right man at the right time.A good President, yes. If he had won a second term, things would have turned out fine. Just not the best President for the times he found himself in.