This is Spectator Radio and you're listening to The Americano podcast with Freddie Gray.

Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and the Trump presidency for the new Spectator USA website.

I'm joined by Daniel McCarthy, who is a regular contributor to Spectator USA and the editor of

modern age.

And we're going to be asking, was George H.W. Bush really that great?

Now, Dan, you wrote quite quickly after the death of President Bush,

quite quickly because I asked you to do it quite quickly, but you wrote a fairly harsh, I'd say,

critical assessment of the president. You're not a great fan of his. I mean, have you found the

sort of mourning for him this week a bit sickening? I would certainly say it is cloying. Maybe sickening is

slightly too much. And it's not just because of George H.W. Bush's own record. This whole

idea of several days of national mourning culminating in the shutdown of the federal government,

the no mail is being delivered. This is quite an unusual and new development. I think it began

maybe two presidents ago with President Reagan. Reagan at least was a world historical figure of a

stature that I could see some justification for. But thereafter you had Gerald Ford get this kind of

treatment. Ford was a mediocrity by any measure. And now George H.W. Bush, who is not just a mediocrity,

but an actual failure and disaster.

And explain why he's a failure, first of all, perhaps on the domestic front and then looking at his foreign policy.

Well, certainly for conservatives, George H.W. Bush was a crushing disappointment.

This was someone about whom conservatives had very serious reservations

when he was, first of all, running against Ronald Reagan in 1980 for the Republican nomination

for president, and then when he became Reagan's vice president and subsequently ran for president

himself in 1988. So going back to 1980, when he was running against Reagan, he referred

...