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. 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

to Reagan's tax cutting and plans for supply-side economics as voodoo economics.

And so when George H.W. Bush was seeking the Republican nomination for president

after having been the vice president in 1988, there was a lot of doubt among conservatives.

Is this guy really someone we can rely upon when it comes to taxes in the economy?

And so George H.W. Bush made a very strict pledge at the Republican Convention in 1988

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