Former Vice President Dick Cheney became the latest Republican to endorse Kamala Harris for president over the weekend, but his former boss has remained distressingly silent on the matter.
With the Clintons and Obamas openly endorsing Harris, the right thing for George W. Bush to do would be to loudly endorse Donald Trump. Let's not get our hopes up too high, but this quote from financial titan David Rubinstein's new book might be the closest we'll get.
of Booksfeatures interviews with former presidents and historians, and quotes Bush as he reflects on the response to the financial crisis and how it led to the rise of American populism.
I asked [Treasury Secretary] Paulson and [Federal Reserve Chairman] “It's a total political failure that Chairman Bernanke used your money to bail out the people who created these things in the first place,” Bush said. “You wonder why populism is on the rise. It starts with handing taxpayer money to those in power. It really irritates a lot of Americans, and they still haven't gotten over it. That's just part of it, there are a lot of other reasons. But candidates are just saying, 'You're angry, I'm going to make you more angry,' as opposed to, 'You're angry, I have a solution to make you less angry.' We're in a phase, so to speak, where people are capitalizing on their anger, instead of addressing it as leaders should.”
What a man. Bush is basically saying he's to blame. He was forced into the 2008 bailout against good conscience and now realizes it was the wrong thing to do. The only way to “assuage” people's anger is to actually offer “solutions” to the problems he now admits his administration created.
Rubinstein said, Interview I spoke to Semaphore about the book.
George W. Bush, although he went to Harvard Business School, was obviously not a fan of Wall Street. And when the financial crisis happened, he couldn't believe that Treasury Secretary Ben Bernanke and everybody was telling him that we needed these bailouts, because he thought that they were basically bailouts for mistakes that the banks had made. But ultimately he became convinced that if we didn't do it, the economy would collapse. … But I think George Bush's Midland Texas instincts were the exact opposite of what his administration actually did.”
Bush, like Cheney and other anti-Trump Republicans, is a product of the post-Cold War establishment, but he's a good old Texas boy at heart. He can't fully support Trump and walk away with the same legacy — at least not in the swampy world he inhabits. But the best we can hope for is to admit he was wrong and that the status quo cannot continue. Obama, Biden, Harris, and the traditional Republicans in Congress all offer little more than the country Bush handed over in 2009. There is only one person in America who offers real change and real solutions.
