Call it Poppy chic: respect for Bush snr reveals dim view of Dubya

OPINION:The 41st US president’s stock is high, which is more than can be said for his headstrong son’s, writes MAUREEN DOWD

I FLEW down to Houston last year to have lunch with George Herbert Walker Bush.

“Did you come because you think I’m going to die?” he asked me with a wry smile. Not at all, I replied, adding that I wanted to join him on his planned sky-diving excursion when he turned 90. (It sends the world a message, as he puts it, that “old guys can still do exciting things”.)

It made me sad to see him in a wheelchair, his lower legs weakened by Parkinsonitis. He had once been so kinetic that the Chinese press described him as “ants on a hot pan”, and his golf game was so manic that W dubbed it “golf-polo”.

But 41 [41st president of the United States] can still drive his cigarette boat, Fidelity IV, in Kennebunkport, Mass, and was very much himself over pizza at his favourite Houston dive: racy jokes, no airs, ever gracious. He spoke fondly of his new pal, Bill Clinton, and highly of President Barack Obama. (His only tart word was reserved for Donald Trump, the birther agitator.)

Bush is so reluctant to use “the big I,” as his mother called displays of ego, that he never even cashed in with a proper presidential memoir. It would have required a sustained first-person singular.

But as he turns 88 this week with a birthday clambake in Kennebunkport and a screening of an admiring HBO documentary, 41, we are in the midst of what his biographer, Jon Meacham, calls “Poppy chic”.

A new CNN/ORC International poll found that Bush the senior is far more respected than Bush the junior, who is the least popular among the living former presidents.

The British may have the royal family, but we have the roiling family. It’s lucky that these Mayflower patricians hate introspection so much, because if they looked at their dynasty through a Shakespearean lens, they would be stunned.

One of the best things that ever happened to 41 was having his rowdy son get it together after prodigal decades and join the family business of politics. And it was one of the worst, because Poppy had to watch W distance himself, run as the heir to Ronald Reagan and then tar the family name by governing destructively, egged on by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld (41’s old nemesis).

Poppy was relegated to the sidelines, an ex-president whose advice was not solicited even when his son went to war with the same Iraqi dictator whom 41 had trounced and contained. (It was President Obama who gave Poppy the Medal of Freedom, not W)