Presidents give hundreds of speeches.
But, for better or worse, we tend to remember a few one-liners.
There you go again.
I did not have sexual relations with that woman.
Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.
You know if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon.
For President George H.W. Bush it's:
Read my lips. No new taxes.
And the thing about that line is it's about so much more than taxes.
It's about the battle for the soul of the Republican Party.
A battle that Bush lost.
And a battle whose repercussions we're still living with.
Tonight accepting the nomination for president of the United States -
portraying himself during the course of his speech as the guy next door.
With your values of hard work, family,
sensitive about greed,
sensitive about the homeless,
sensitive about the need to do better for women economically,
but tough-on-crime, for guns,
against taxes, for the environment.
He was presiding over a split party.
George Bush represented one wing of the party,
which was this sort of northeast,
patrician, some call it country club Republican party.
These Republicans were wealthy,
educated at prestigious universities,
and often fairly moderate when it came to economic issues like budgets and taxes -
and on social issues like abortion and gay rights.
That had certain characteristics that were
very different from the Reagan wing.
Spurred by the anti-war movement,
the legalization of abortion,
and the civil rights movement,
groups with more conservative beliefs on race, gender, and culture
rallied behind Reagan.
All of these come together in a new coalition
called the Reagan coalition.
George Bush isn't the one who pulled them together.
George Bush was considered a counterfeit conservative
by many Reaganites.
They didn't trust him quite frankly.
Bush tried to seem less elite, less country club.
He used to talk about how much he liked eating pork rinds.
He needed to push a little bit to be culturally acceptable.
It wasn't just the cultural stuff.
Bush's type of economic conservatism differed from his predecessor as well.
While Bush focused on pragmatism -
balancing budgets without increases to spending.
Reagan had a different plan.
It was called supply-side economics.
That you could slash the amount of money
that the federal government got in tax revenue,
while at the same time spending more money on the military.
This appealed to a larger base of middle-class voters
and small and big business owners,
and it was a great idea in theory.
Well it didn't - it just didn't work out that way.
Indeed the United States started getting these huge budget deficits.
What was George was supposed to do?
He never believed in Ronald Reagan's approach to economics.
Voodoo economic policy!
It just isn't going to work.
Reagan's trickle-down economics meant Bush inherited
a massive budget deficit from Reagan.
Which is why, even though he said,
"Read my lips no new taxes."
He had no other alternatives.
The handwriting is on the wall for George H.W. Bush
as president the United States.
He realizes that he is not going to be able to keep
that 'No new taxes' pledge.
I did it because I thought it was right. And I made a mistake.
He recognized he had to put country over party.
Democrats controlled the House and Senate,
so Bush teamed up with them to pass a bill
to fix the deficit by raising the top tax rate on the wealthy.
He had very little support on his own side of the political aisle.
His willingness to create a "gentler, kinder nation"
did not sit well with right-wing Republicans.
Bush's presidency was characterized by his ability
to build bridges and make bipartisan deals.
Passing the landmark 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act.
Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down.
Which the New York Times called the most sweeping
anti-discrimination bill since the Civil Rights Act.
After the Exxon Valdez oil spill off the coast of Alaska,
He built another bipartisan coalition to strengthen the Clean Air Act
and he signed into law an immigration bill that
kept families together, and let more people into the country.
Immigration is not just a link to America's past,
It's also a bridge to America's future.
Abroad he earned the trust of Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev,
and got him to accept a unified Germany.
Over a million people here, celebrating a day that they
never thought would come. The day in which Germany became one country again.
He was a man who understood diplomacy.
He understood that in order to connect with people,
who represent other countries, you have to put yourself in their shoes.
But his successes abroad didn't quell cultural and economic discontent stateside.
From NBC News: Decision '92 Election Night
These politicians who put themselves out
work so hard and then are crushed effectively.
The people have spoken and we respect
the majesty of the democratic system.
The new president of the United States,
his wife Hillary and their daughter Chelsea.
Bush's loss led Reaganites to abandon
a moderate bipartisan approach to politics,
and the Republican Party has moved further to the right ever since.
They see '92, they see the collapse of the Bush presidency,
and they know that this is the time for them to make their move.
You see that the House going more and more to the right.
Political scientists actually measure this.
They take individual members of Congress,
look at all of the bills that they vote yes and no for,
and assign them a score based on those votes.
They get one score for their votes on economic stuff
and another for their votes on social issues.
Do this for every member,
and you get a kind of ideological map of Congress.
And that map has been changing since before
Bush lost the presidency.
If you look at the average ideology scores for both parties over time,
Republicans in the House have been getting more conservative
more quickly than their Democratic peers have shifted left.
It's true for presidents too.
From Eisenhower to George W. Bush,
the ideology scores for Republicans get increasingly conservative
while Democrats scores stay roughly consistent over time.
I think George H.W. Bush becomes an inflection point
for not only the presidency,
the generational movements,
the last World War II, Greatest Generation president
but also they may be the last Republicans of that country-club,
Northeast republicanism.
In an interview with journalist Mark Updegrove,
Bush confirmed that he voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
His party had become so unrecognizable in his lifetime,
the former president voted for the wife of the man
who had beat him 24 years earlier.