In the On Politics newsletter, how Mr. Bush spent his political career chasing his party, and why Republicans are glad to delay the shutdown fight.
Hi. Welcome to On Politics, your guide to the day in national politics. I’m Lisa Lerer, your host.
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At lunch last week, a political strategist told me that she believes politicians spend their careers rerunning their first campaigns. No matter the issues, no matter the opponent, they can never quite shake that first playbook.
Her theory popped into my head this weekend when I heard the news of George Bush’s death. The former president launched his career in elected office with a 1964 bid for Senate in his adopted home state of Texas.
During that race, Mr. Bush, a patrician New Englander nicknamed “Poppy,” refashioned himself into a kind of Barry Goldwater-lite, coming out against the Civil Rights Act, opposing the Nuclear Test Ban treaty and denouncing the United Nations, where he’d serve as ambassador seven years later.
Mr. Bush came to regret that pivot. After he lost the race, he told his minister: “I took some of the far-right positions to get elected. I hope I never do it again.”
Two years later, Mr. Bush ran for Congress as more of a centrist Republican. He won, flipping a Houston-area congressional seat that had been held by Democrats for more than 80 years.
But he would never outrun the tensions of that first Senate race. That struggle — between his moderate, country club roots and a Republican Party shifting right — would come to define Mr. Bush’s political life.
In the broadest terms, Mr. Bush’s political story mirrors that of the G. O. P. over his lifetime: a long-running civil war between moderates and conservatives that resulted in the all-but-extinction of the Rockefeller Republican and the rise of Donald J. Trump.
Again and again, throughout his political career, Mr. Bush would cut right to stay on track with his party.
He recanted his abortion-rights politics and opinion of supply-side economics as ”voodoo” to be picked as Ronald Reagan’s running mate in 1980. Eight years later, he painted his Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, as a mentally unstable, unpatriotic left-wing radical, an attack that culminated in the Willie Horton ad, an infamous spot even Mr. Trump’s dirty trickster Roger Stone called “racist.”
Even his famous 1988 convention speech pledge — “read my lips: no new taxes” — was designed to boost enthusiasm for his presidential candidacy among the party’s conservative wing.
But when Mr. Bush broke that promise two years later, conservatives never forgave him. The fallout contributed to his re-election loss in 1992.
