Dec 5, 2015 4 min read

These are good days to be a Bush.

Alas, maybe not for Jeb Bush, once upon a time the frontrunner for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination. Given his current poll numbers, the wise money has the former Florida governor safely back in the private sector by Valentine’s Day.

And not for former President George W. Bush, whose reputation has yet to overcome chaos in Iraq, chaos in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina or chaos in the markets after the 2008 collapse of the world economy.

No, the Bush who’s looking increasingly good nowadays is their dad, former President George H.W. Bush.

Now an increasingly enfeebled 91-year-old, the senior Bush is surely benefiting from public sympathy for his frailty. And his presidency is now almost a quarter-century in the past, more than long enough for the concerns and preoccupations of those times to become hazy or simply be forgotten. But even though he was one of four 20th century U.S. presidents cast out of office after a single term – William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter were the other three – he can now be appreciated as a judicious, level-headed steward of the United States as it triumphantly emerged from the Cold War.

The 41st president’s reputation is being burnished thanks in part to a new biography, “Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush” by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham, where Bush speaks honestly about the missteps of his son’s presidency. His standing is also helped when he is placed alongside today’s crop of Republican leaders. As the 2015 GOP drifts further and further into far-right dogmatism and further and further from empiricism and rationality, his moderation and caution look better and better.

To wit, consider newly released memos from Bush’s White House about climate change. While it is now de rigueur for Republicans to flatly deny that climate change is happening, or to shrug and say, well, there’s nothing we can do about it, Bush’s White House acknowledged its reality and – gasp! – was interested in leading on the issue.

According to The Washington Post, a February 1989 memo to James Baker, then the secretary of state, called global warming “the most far-reaching environmental issue of our time.” The memo, from Acting Assistant Secretary of State Richard A. Smith, went on to say, “If the climate change within the range of current predictions actually occurs, the consequences for every nation and every aspect of human activity will be profound.”

What? No passive, wait-and-see approach? No suggestion that climate change has been drummed up in the laboratories of lefty, grant-seeking scientists?

Contrast this, almost 27 years later, with Capitol Hill Republicans who would be more than pleased if the ongoing Paris climate talks came to naught and we burned more and more fossil fuels. The House of Representatives gave a thumbs down last week to President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which aims to reduce emissions from power plants, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell warned that the United States’ participation in any agreement reached in Paris could be undone by Obama’s successor. On MSNBC, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, someone who passes for a moderate in today’s GOP, said that he didn’t see evidence that global warming is a crisis.

The governor might want to visit crumbling Arctic ice caps or Pacific islands that are being slowly drowned. But Christie’s remark is, in fact, incontrovertible evidence that today’s Republican Party would almost certainly give someone as sensible as George H.W. Bush the back of its hand.