If History is Any Guide

George W. Bush beat a couple of historical jinxes on November 2nd. He not only put to rest the Washington Redskin hex, but he also became the first of our four father-son presidents to run for reelection and win. Given the history of the Adamses and Bushes, this is somewhat amazing. After all, there are plenty of historical reasons to think that this president would have joined this star-crossed threesome.

Let’s begin with the first member of this exclusive club. In 1796 John Adams might have set a precedent, but didn’t. Our first vice-president became the first vice-president to move directly to the presidency by virtue of winning the office on his own. Since then, that particular progression has transpired only three times since, most recently in 1988 when the first Bush succeeded Ronald Reagan. Just in case anyone is curious, the other two were Martin Van Buren and Thomas Jefferson. Then there is Al Gore who is still convinced that he should have been the fourth.

Actually, Gore’s defeat can be partially explained by turning to another dimension of the Adams-Bush parallel. John Adams and George Bush each succeeded a presidential titan. Just as the first Adams won the third term that George Washington renounced, so the first Bush secured the third term that Ronald Reagan was constitutionally ineligible to contest. For that matter, Martin Van Buren followed another such titan, “King Andrew” Jackson. Poor Al Gore. This Tennessean is not just a poor excuse for a Tennessee titan, but he had the unenviable task of running as the lapdog of a poor excuse for a presidential titan.

While we’re not through with the role of these Tennesseans in the political lives of the Adamses and Bushes, let’s concentrate for now on the less-than-successful presidencies of the Adams and the Bush who did not defeat a Tennessean. Once in office, the first President Adams and the first President Bush proved to be equally and surprisingly inept. This should not necessarily have been so. Adams, after all, had been a considerable presence at the creation of 1776 before holding crucial diplomatic posts and achieving high elective office. The resume of Bush the elder is not exactly of Adamite proportions, but it is lengthy (if mostly appointive) nonetheless. Included on his list of credits was a stint as CIA Director, a post he accepted despite misgivings that it would cost him dearly if and when he ever made a bid for the presidency. Actually, “when” had long been the operative word for George Herbert Walker Bush.

Here the Adams I-Bush I parallel breaks down a bit, even as it curiously connects to a similar discontinuity in the Adams II-Bush II stories. The first Bush presumed that he would one day be a presidential candidate. In fact, it would be fair to say that at some point well before 1980 Bush I began to thirst after and prepare for the White House. By all accounts, the first Adams was not driven by similar thirsts. Nor did he make anything approaching similar plans.

And the second Adams? He may have been prepared for the office, but he did not exactly thirst for it. And Bush II? By his own admission, time spent slaking other thirsts crowded out any White House dreams and certainly cut into any presidential preparation efforts.

In no substantive sense was Bush II groomed for the office he now holds—unless running a barely minor league oil company and owning a barely major league baseball team amount to dress rehearsals for the White House. For that matter, John Quincy Adams was not precisely groomed to be president either. Certainly, he was not groomed as an Al Gore was groomed. Perhaps this was so because his father had actually been president and therefore sought to spare his son the inevitable headaches, heartaches, and failures.

To be sure, John Quincy Adams was groomed to be a patriot and a public servant in the best sense of each term. And perhaps that’s the best grooming that anyone could ever have for public office, high or otherwise. Certainly it’s far better than anything the senior Gore (and frustrated presidential aspirant) ever managed to pass along to his son.

But if both Adamses and the first Bush were well-prepared and well-groomed, politically speaking, each was less than effective once the office was his. A good part of the ineffectiveness of the Adamses is explained by their distaste for politics, which no doubt was a reflection of their aristocratic pretensions (which belied the family’s plebian origins). Distasteful isn’t quite the right word to describe the attitude of the patrician Bush to the great game of politics. Disinterested might be, but uninterested would be better. If both Adamses thought they were above the political game, Bush I could not disguise his boredom with it.

Of course, it could be argued that the games of politics and governance are not one and the same. Certainly Adlai Stevenson thought they were different, and look where it got him. Both Adamses also thought so, and while they advanced a notch higher on that ultimate greasy pole, look what it got them: four years of near-total failure and (the same) four years of near-complete frustration.

In the case of the two Adamses, failure and frustration were traceable in part to their less than sunny dispositions, which no doubt had something to do with their ineptness when it came to engaging in the great game of politics. The Bushes may share a New England ancestry with the Adamses, but they do not share the dour Adams temperament. If anything, each Bush may well be handicapped by an excess of sunshine in his psychological life. Whether this difference between the two families is part of the larger story of the decline and fall of the New England WASP or is a side effect of too much Texas success for transplanted New Englanders is interesting to speculate about, but ultimately beside the point
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What is to the point is that their very different psyches and completely different personalities left them equally adrift when it came to dealing with politicians whose will power and general stick-to-it-ive-ness proved to be a good deal stronger than their own. This version of the other great American game of hardball does not come naturally to those with a tendency to sulk and withdraw (the Adamses) or smile and backslap (the Bushes). Some of the above applies all too well to three of the four one-term presidents. But in the end little, if any, of it has applied to the fourth
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Still, the parallels ought to have been worrisome to this President Bush. And parallels there were. Adams I and Bush I both married women of considerable political talent and backbone. Abigail Adams was at least her husband’s equal in the talent department; and Barbara Bush remains more than her husband’s equal when it comes to measuring the density and stiffness of the family spine. Fortunately, Barbara Bush’s eldest son is also his mother’s son. George W. Bush revealed as much in his convention acceptance speech, and he has demonstrated as much both in office and in this fall’s campaign. In short, this man of ready grin has proven to be a man of grit and bluntness. Which is to say, his penchant for backslapping should not be taken for the absence of a backbone.

Nonetheless, the parallels refused to go away. Adams I and Bush I each faced similar tests of their talent and tenacity in that each faced a significant political challenge from a dissident wing of his own party. For Adams, it was the High Federalists, who foisted a “quasi-war” with France and the Alien and Sedition Acts on him. For Bush, it was the Buchananites, who brought most of the darkness into his mostly sunny days. If Adams stood accused by Hamiltonians of being insufficiently Federalist when it came to dealing with the French navy abroad and French sympathizers at home, Bush stood accused of being insufficiently conservative when it came to dealing with everything from taxes to the culture war.

The fact that the second Bush had no organized intra-party challenge separated him from both his father and other recent incumbents. Witness not just the elder Bush’s 1992 defeat, but the fate of Jimmy Carter (after the Ted Kennedy challenge) and that of the Democrats in 1968. In recent decades only Richard Nixon was able to withstand a primary opponent, and a relatively minor one at that (John Ashbrook), and secure reelection.

Nor did Bush the Younger face what the second Adams encountered when he bid for a second term, namely an angry Tennessean who thought he’d been cheated out of the prize four years earlier. First there was the “corrupt bargain” of 1824 (when John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay cut their infamous deal to deny the presidency to Andrew Jackson, who had won a plurality of both the popular and electoral vote). Then there were the hanging chads of 2000 and another Tennessean who thought he had reason to feel that he had been done in by not just one but two sons of a former president.

If John Quincy Adams were around today, he might be inclined to mutter to Al Gore, “I knew Andrew Jackson, and you’re no Andrew Jackson.” And, of course, he’d be right. Still, had Al Gore chosen to enter this race the parallels would have been even more apt. Then again, this facet of the parallel extends no further than that both were—or (at least in the case of Gore claimed to be)—Tennesseans.

In the end Bush won not because he did not have to face a re-match with a Tennessean, but because he was the Tennessean (that is to say, the Jacksonian) in this race. The term “Jacksonian Republican” may seem oxymoronic, but it shouldn’t be, especially when the matter at hand is foreign policy, and most especially in post-9/11 America. The original Jackson, after all, would have preferred to leave the rest of the world alone, but having fought the English and the Spanish, he knew that his country had enemies and he was always ready to rally his countrymen to defeat them. More than that, he believed in America’s manifest destiny and embodied American exceptionalism.

It goes without saying that George Bush’s America is not Andrew Jackson’s America and that today’s America is inevitably much more in the world. It also goes without saying that today’s America faces not just enemies, but enemies much more evil and much more dangerous than those of Andy Jackson’s era.

The Democrats of 2004 did not be obliging the Adams-Bush parallel by nominating a second Tennessean a second time. But in John Kerry they provided the GOP with a Gore-like opponent (is there any other?). This opponent and his party of course pretended to look evil in the eye, but together the Democrats made it quite clear that they were determined to leave evil alone as they looked forward to the day when America will little more than an appendage of western Europe and an agent of the UN. In sum, today’s Democrats neither believe in America’s manifest destiny nor assert American exceptionalism.

No, the Andy Jackson would not be welcome in today’s Democratic party. Jackson, remember, was a hater, but a hater who reserved his most intense animosity for enemies abroad, especially the English, the Spanish, and, yes, the native peoples—and not for his domestic political opponents, not even for John Quincy Adams. And today’s Democrats? Let’s just say that they have a very different set of priorities in mind when they go about composing their enemies list. Let’s also say that anyone who thinks and acts like the original Jackson would certainly be on it.

By the way, whatever has happened to those Democratic Jefferson-Jackson Day dinners of yesteryear?? No doubt they have gone the way not just of Andy Jackson Democrats, but of “Scoop” Jackson Democrats as well. All of which left an opening for the second Bush to be the real Jacksonian in this race.

Ironic as it may be, Bush II won reelection by breaking with the Adams-Bush parallel twice over. If the second Adams lost to a Jackson, the second Bush won by being Jacksonian—and by defeating a candidate from the Adamses state of Massachusetts in the process. Having won a second term doesn’t mean that this Bush should stop smiling, good guying, and backslapping, all of which come naturally to this brand of New Englander-turned-Texan. But it does mean that the president must make sure that his countrymen, as well as his country’s enemies, understand that he means business in precisely the same way that the Andy Jackson meant business.

That George W. Bush was reelected is solid evidence that his countrymen do understand him. This is probably true of many who did not vote for him. They may not agree with him; they dislike him and even hate him; but some of them grudgingly understand what he is about. Will the rest of the world follow? If so, this son of a former president will not just have that elusive second term, but he will have a second four years of great consequence. Before it’s all over George W. Bush may well be a presidential titan of the sort that both Adamses and the first Bush followed.