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Father figured.

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GEORGE HERBERT WALKER BUSH (PENGUIN LIVES SERIES) BY TOM WICKER * LIPPER/VIKING * 228 PAGES * $19.95

WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT JUST A few years ago that George Herbert Walker Bush would, to put it a bit cruelly, be relevant again? When he left office in January 1993, ceding the White House to a new party, a new generation, and a new governing philosophy, Bush seemed to slink off into the cavernous warehouse of history, settling into a nook alongside the undistinguished presidents of yesteryear. Undermined by the political right, abandoned by his predecessor's "Reagan Democrats," routed by the youthful, can-do Bill Clinton, Bush by the end was fatalistically watching the sands run out on his own tenure. James Carville compared him to an old calendar.

By the time of Bush's departure, Americans had practically forgotten his justly celebrated expulsion of Saddam Hussein's army from Kuwait two years earlier. Bush himself had fed this amnesia by failing to bring the tyrant to justice. More important, he never understood that jobs and health care matter as much as (and sometimes more than) war and peace--or that his laissez-faire nostrums and hands off economic management struck voters as cluelessness or, worse, indifference.

Today, however, after a second George Bush as president, a second war in Iraq, and a second economic slump...

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