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George H. W. Bush has died.  Everyone is writing about him.  I don't have too much to say.  At 94, he lived longer than any other U.S. President, though that record may soon be beaten by Jimmy Carter.

He's also the only President since Carter to serve only one term.  Like most one-term presidents, Bush was a victim of bad timing.  His popularity was so high after the Gulf War that top Democrats refused to run against him, so the opportunity devolved to second-tier candidate Bill Clinton.  At certain points in the campaign, Clinton threatened to finish third, but the economy went through a mild recession which was treated (as are all recessions in modern times) as the worst economy since the Depression.  Clinton took the White House with 43% of the vote.

Going back four years, Bush's winning campaign in 1988 was actually pretty memorable.  In many ways, he ran as the third term of Ronald Reagan--and his victory is the only time since Truman that a party took the White House three times in a row.  But in the early stages his campaign wasn't going too well. In July, the Gallup poll had him 17 points behind opponent Michael Dukakis.  And Bush picked Dan Quayle as his running mate, which many saw as a weak choice.

But he kept chipping away at that lead, with memorable phrases like "kinder, gentler nation" and "read my lips: no new taxes." (Whether he made the nation kinder or gentler is a matter of dispute, but he definitely agreed to new taxes.) By election day, Bush won with over 53% of the vote.  No one has hit that level since.

It was also a less polarized time in that the states were pretty much all up for grabs.  Bush ended up winning 40 of them, including California, New Jersey, Vermont, Illinois, Delaware and Connecticut. (By comparison, the biggest vote-getter since, Barack Obama, won only 28 states plus the District of Columbia.)

Bush was, in general, a moderate, though he wasn't always treated so at the time.  He believed in compromising to make deals. (You'd think that's popular, but, as the results show, not really.  People say they want bipartisanship, but what they want most are results.) Maybe his most significant domestic policy was the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

His record on the economy is mixed, but he seemed less interested in that than foreign policy.  And it was certainly a lively (and successful) time with the Gulf War, not to mention his presiding over the fall of communism.

What angers conservatives most about Bush, even more than the long-forgotten tax hike, was his job on the Supreme Court.  After Reagan's fight over Robert Bork, Bush seemed to choose candidates with little paper trail.  This led to--on the recommendation of Chief of Staff John Sununu--the choice of David Souter to fill Justice William Brennan's seat. In other words, Bush had the chance to turn the court conservative--probably more important than everything else he did combined as far as the right was concerned--and blew it.  His second Court pick was Clarence Thomas, whose nomination was one of the most contentious in history, though the results were more pleasing to conservatives.

As for Bush's place in history, I don't think there'll be a fair assessment until he's at least out of living memory.  My guess, though, is he'll be thought of as being somewhere in the middle.