For a day George W. Bush got to bask in the glow of $250 million worth of sparkly new building, and all the invited dignitaries agreed to play nice.
During the speechifying never was heard a discouraging word about Iraq or Afghanistan, about bank failures or housing bubbles, about ballooning budget deficits or swelling income inequality. No one made any jokes about hanging chads in Florida which helped make George W. Bush the first president installed rather than elected to office since Ruther"fraud" B. Hayes in 1876. They came to praise George W. Bush, not to bury him. And the sky was not cloudy all day.
Characteristically, Bill Clinton got off the best line of the event when he remarked that the building represented the latest attempt by presidents to re-write history. The line drew laughs but in fact it won't prove to be true.
Nothing in that library will alter our essential understanding of the Bush administration. There may be some acknowledgement of things accomplished around the edges -- the sorts of things stressed at the library opening: support for AIDS prevention in Africa, an end to the war in Sudan. Noble enough but they will not outweigh the choices and decisions Bush made (and did not make) that left this country by 2009 in the greatest mess it had been in since 1860: the worst economy since the Great Depression and two feckless and failing wars.
Those who hope that the new library will serve as a "rebranding" of the Bush presidency, or who just want to engage in some Texas-style nostalgia for the good ol' W days -- and there were plenty of them in Dallas to cut the ribbon -- would do well to remember another mess their boy left.
The existential writhing the Republican Party is currently engaged in can be traced back to George W. Bush and in more than the obvious way. Certainly the Democratic Party's electoral victories in 2006, 2008 and again in 2012 represented a reaction against and a rejection of Bush and his administration, referenda on its many failings.
But as plenty of commentators and opinion polls have noted, Americans are rejecting the party itself, not just the last Republican president. They view it as mean-spirited, out-of-step, the party of narrow-minded, censorious moral scolds. They aren't wrong, and W played a pivotal role in creating the current incarnation of the GOP.
To see how requires a trip back to 1988. Reagan was leaving Washington less with a bang and more with a whimper. His popularity was down, his presidency tarnished, though not nearly as much as it should have been, by the Constitutional crisis called the Iran-Contra scandal. Despite the much-trumpeted "Reagan Revolution," the GOP still had plenty of prominent moderates of the sort who used to be called "Rockefeller Republicans."
One of them was Vice President, and presumptive GOP presidential nominee, George H. W. Bush. A Yankee patrician and Yale man through and through, Bush senior had a long resume of inside-the-beltway public service of the sort that made the new Reagan conservatives deeply suspicious. An essentially hollow man, Bush Senior had been selling his political beliefs on everything from reproductive choice to economic policy (he was, after all, the man who described the current GOP economic orthodoxy back in 1980 as "voodoo economics") in order to curry favor with the Reaganites. But in 1988 they still did not trust him.
So Bush faced a choice: run a campaign toward the center, bringing the GOP back toward the political middle, or go all in to appeal to the far-right. He chose the latter and he tasked his son with helping him do it.
In 1988, W served as the liaison between his father and the world of right-wing Christians that the elder, basically Episcopalian Bush neither understood nor liked. As a fervent born-again, W understood these people, spoke in their tongues. He reassured them that his father's agenda was their agenda too. Bush ran a truly vile campaign -- masterminded by Lee Atwater -- and it worked. Thus did the GOP mortgage its soul to its far-right, religious-driven constituency.
Perhaps the far-right take-over of the GOP was inevitable, but in 1988 Bush the father and Bush the son decided the throw Pandora's box wide open, and as a result what had been the politically useful fringe of the party has become its heart and soul. After 1988 the GOP has become the party of Tom Delay and Bob Barr and Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum and John Ashcroft (who really did speak in tongues) and Michelle Bachmann and... well, the list runs on and on.
One remarkable aspect of W's presidency was that he consistently failed to anticipate the consequences of his policies -- whether in Iraq, or in the nation's public schools, or its banks. He wrecked all of those and we are still undoing the damage.
But I wonder how many of those who gathered in Dallas to cheer the former president recognized just how much he wrecked their party as well.
Steven Conn teaches history at Ohio State University. His most recent book is To Promote the General Welfare: The Case for Big Government (Oxford University Press).