A picture promoting the NRA presidential coin set from the group's online store. (Photo: NRAStore.com)

In 1995, President George H.W. Bush gave up his lifetime membership in the National Rifle Association via an angry open letter in which he expressed his outrage over a fundraising pitch made by current NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre that described federal agents as "jack-booted government thugs" wearing "Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms." Though President Bush said he was "deeply" offended and asked the organization to "remove my name from your membership list," seventeen years later, the NRA is still promoting his past association with the group in its online gift shop.

One of the "premium" items in the NRA store is the "NRA Presidential Series Collectible Coin Set." The full set of eight coins sells for $89.95 and features portraits of what the site describes as "all eight NRA-affiliated Presidents" and a "bonus" coin with the NRA logo. President Bush is depicted on the coins along with John F. Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, Teddy Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, Ulysses S. Grant, William Howard Taft and Richard Nixon. Interestingly, three of the presidents in the NRA's commemorative coin series, Reagan, Roosevelt and Kennedy, were victims of gun violence during their careers (in JFK's case the wound was, of course, fatal).

The Observer reached out to the NRA to ask why they were still including President Bush as an "NRA-affiliated President" in their coin set despite his break with the organization. As of this writing, we have not received a response. We also spoke to Jim McGrath the spokesman for President Bush. Mr. McGrath said he was unaware of the coin set, but would not be able to get back to us with a response until at least next week as President Bush is currently in intensive care at a Houston hospital.

Or, rather, she would have been that tradition's successor -- if her plan had succeeded.

Yesterday, a Manhattan federal court unsealed a complaint that accused Lady Toumei, a fake countess from Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., of collaborating with a Brooklyn man and a Queens man, both of whom falsely adopted the surname "Guggenheim," in a clearly botched seizure of Great American Family bank accounts.

At a certain point in the effort, the tripartite team of impostors set its sights on President George W. Bush and President George H. W. Bush.

"The Bush family is always invited to Manhattan, where they will be a guest of the Guggenheims, at any time," Lady Toumei wrote to an adviser of the elder Bush leader.

The coup was to be twofold: Lady Toumei and her two sidekicks would not only attempt to ingratiate themselves into these near-royal families, our country's closest approximations of Europe's titled aristocracy, but they demanded bounty as well. The New York Times said that the crew "tried to solicit money and promote billions of dollars in false investment deals that involved diamonds, crude oil, vodka and bank notes."

The Times also noted that no money or valuables were lost by the targets of the crime.

The anger over the attempted theft has already leaked onto Lady Toumei's Facebook page, where she has "favourited" the pages of HIRH Princess Susana von Radic, Fondation Prince Albert II de Monaco, and Warren Buffett.

"Anyone can post YouTube videos of Prince Harry and Bill Gates and the Knighting of someone and some charity ball in the Hamptons--doesn't mean you were invited or involved," someone wrote wrote on her wall. "Once again, ENJOY PRISON."

There is no indication as to how this case will proceed, but we will be watching it very carefully.

Click for Scandal Report: Champagne Mania Makes for A Boozy Golden Globes

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

"The way they treat my son and anyone who's opposed to their point of view is just horrible," the former president said of MSNBC's primetime duo.

Say what you will about Olbermann and Maddow, but there is rich irony in the former president-who has, in retirement, somehow morphed into a symbol of some bygone era of chivalry-lamenting the tone of today's political dialogue: because he, as much as anyone else, is the one who created it.

"What's 14 inches long and hangs in front of an asshole?" Bush, according to Richard Ben Cramer's authoritative account of the 1988 presidential campaign, asked a friendly local in Kennebunkport during that race.

She beat him to the punch-line: "Oh, I've heard that one, George. It's Michael Dukakis' tie." They both shared a good laugh over that one. How's that for civil?

And when it comes to the Bush '88 campaign's treatment of Dukakis, that was on the benign end of the scale. It's not hyperbole to say that Bush's campaign, guided by Roger Ailes and Lee Atwater, essentially wrote the modern Republican political playbook-one that relies on vilifying opponents with personal smears, turning the word "liberal" into an epithet, and fracturing the electorate with barely-concealed appeals to prejudice and racism.

The Bush '88 strategy was spawned by necessity. Contrary to the hagiography that has taken hold this decade, the country had actually grown tired of Ronald Reagan, whose second term was bogged down by revelations about arms-for-hostages dealings with Iran and an illegal war in Central America. As the '88 primary season wrapped up, Dukakis built a solid lead over Bush in the polls-one that exploded to 17 points after that July's Democratic convention.

The issues generally favored Dukakis and voters were ready for a change, so the Bushies fought back with an unprecedented blitz of personal attacks and wedge politics. Dukakis' patriotism was challenged with claims that he was "soft" on flag-burning and the pledge of allegiance, and-borrowing from Joe McCarthy-Bush took to referring to him as "a card-carrying member of the ACLU."

And then there was Willie Horton, the furloughed Massachusetts inmate (many states-including Reagan's California-had furlough programs for violent offenders back then), who'd left the state on a weekend pass and committed a brutal assault and rape. A particularly menacing-looking photo of Horton's black face became the centerpiece of an ad that purported to juxtapose Bush's and Dukakis's views on crime.

The issue of crime, of course, had nothing to do with it; it was pure, old-fashioned race-baiting slicked up for national television. The ad was Atwater's brainchild, though in the grand dirty-tricks tradition, he quietly set up an independent committee to fund it and played dumb when reporters asked about it. (Any doubts about Atwater's extensive role have long since been put to rest.)

Through all of this, Bush refused to condemn, or even comment on, his campaign's actions. He was "above the fray," he'd respond, somehow removed from culpability for the vile attack machine that was operating in his name. And he got what he wanted: The assault on Dukakis delivered a 25-point swing, with Bush winning the November election in a 40-state landslide.

Somehow, the media fell for Bush's "above the fray" nonsense, treating him-even as they pummeled him for his domestic policy failures as president-as the quintessential gentleman. One of the sad injustices of presidential politics is that Bush has enjoyed such a reputation for 20 years while the truly decent man he slimed, Dukakis, has never lived down the gruesome caricature created by the Bush machine.

Oh, and about that "sick puppies" put down of Maddow and Olbermann: Just remember, this is the same George H.W. Bush who in June 1992 invited Rush Limbaugh to the White House for an overnight stay in the Lincoln Bedroom-and who personally carried Limbaugh's bags inside when he showed up.

Yes, vice presidents are a heartbeat away from the presidency, so of course the choice matters. But just consider how differently history might have played out if Ronald Reagan had simply gone with his instinct when, in the summer of 1980, it came time to pick a running mate.

Reagan, then 69 years old, arrived in Detroit for the G.O.P.'s mid-July convention with the presidential nomination sewn up. His aides and supporters were putting the finishing touches on a platform that would move the Republicans sharply to the right—abandoning, for instance, decades of support for the Equal Rights Amendment. In his heart, the former California governor had one clear favorite for his No. 2 spot: Kemp, then a 45-year-old congressman from upstate New York and a 10-year veteran of the House.

Kemp was the most prominent and persistent voice for tax cuts on Capitol Hill. Along with Delaware Senator William Roth, he had been pushing legislation that would phase in dramatic rate reductions over a three-year period. Kemp pitched tax cuts as a prescription for the stagflation that gripped the economy in the late-1970s, a way to spur growth, curb unemployment, expand wealth and arrest rising prices. Even among his own party's establishment, though, his views were considered fringe.

But Reagan was a fellow believer and made Kemp-Roth a cornerstone of his '80 campaign. Over the objections of old-guard Republican economic leaders like Herbert Stein and George Schultz, he etched it into the '80 platform. Kemp-Roth was also a hit with the burgeoning network of conservative activists and interest group leaders who had rallied behind Reagan. Kemp had limited national name recognition (despite his fairly successful professional football career), but to what was then called "the New Right," he was a folk hero.

So it was that Reagan, who had been friends and political allies with Kemp since the mid-'60s, regarded the ex-quarterback as his sentimental favorite for the VP slot. And the New Right forces saw in a Reagan-Kemp ticket an opportunity to vanquish the more moderate G.O.P. establishment once and for all, and to cement their party as a purely conservative entity.

With the VP matter unresolved as the convention opened, individual state delegations began conducting their own votes and publicizing the results. Louisiana, Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona and Washington state all endorsed Kemp. And NBC survey of about three-quarters of all convention delegates found that 35 percent wanted Kemp as Reagan's running mate—second only to George H. W. Bush, who netted 47 percent (thanks, in part, to the fact that, as Reagan's closest primary competitor, he had brought more than 100 delegates who had originally been pledged to him).

Also working in Kemp's favor was Reagan's nonexistent relationship with Bush, who very much wanted the VP slot and whose candidacy was being pushed by many moderates. Bush had run against Reagan from the left in the primaries, deriding Reagan's (and, by extension, Kemp's) tax cut plan as "voodoo economics" and voicing his support for abortion rights, and had nearly derailed his candidacy with an upset win in the Iowa caucuses. If it was between Bush and Kemp, the choice for Reagan was an easy one on personal and philosophical grounds.

But as the week progressed, Reagan's pragmatic aides bombarded him with warnings that Kemp would be an unwise pick. The party was sharply divided into conservative and moderate camps (this was the era when the term "New England Republican" wasn't an oxymoron), and the moderates were already deeply uneasy with the party platform.

And with John Anderson, a liberal Republican congressman who (after a failed G.O.P. primary bid) had bolted the party, running as an independent, these moderates would have another option in November if they felt abused by their party. Picking Kemp, Reagan was told, would do nothing to appease them. Bush, meanwhile, would help unite the party and, with his extensive resume and national name recognition, help assuage voter doubts about entrusting the White House to Reagan. It's important to remember just how radical, even within some corners of the G.O.P., Reagan was perceived to be in 1980.

So, after a last-minute effort to coax Gerald Ford onto the ticket (teaming up with a former president, Reagan believed, would make the G.O.P. ticket virtually unbeatable) failed on the third night of the convention, Reagan settled on Bush and then, with the television networks all broadcasting live, went to the convention hall to announce his choice personally.

In hindsight, Reagan probably would have beaten Jimmy Carter that fall no matter whom he chose as a running mate; his masterful debate performance a week before the election saw to that. But the long-term consequences of picking Bush over Kemp were profound.

First, Bush became the clear front-runner for the 1988 G.O.P. nomination the minute he and Reagan were elected. He used his status as VP to stay in the news, win over crucial allies within the party, and to help build a top-notch fund-raising and campaign operation. As Reagan's No. 2, his name became the knee-jerk response when most casual Republican voters were asked who they'd like as their party's next nominee.

But had Bush not been on the '80 ticket, he probably wouldn't have been much of a factor in the '88 election. Sure, he finished second in the '80 primaries, but with Reagan at the top, the party moved further and further to the right in the '80s. By '88, Bush's moderate '80 platform had become political poison for Republican office-seekers. As Reagan's VP, Bush had the cover he needed to artfully shed his liberal reputation and to rebrand himself as a Reagan Republican. He couldn't have credibly pulled this off otherwise.

This meant that, even though he was the natural heir to the Reagan mantle, Kemp was shut out in '88. Once Reagan was reelected in 1984, Kemp began his 1988 campaign, making hundreds of speeches to groups of all size across the country. The same activists who'd championed him in '80 were still with him, but among the broader G.O.P. electorate, he was largely unknown. An April 1986 poll found that 58 percent of Republican voters wanted Bush as their next nominee. Second place was Howard Baker, who had just stepped down as the Senate G.O.P. leader. Kemp finished sixth with just 4 percent.

Kemp ran anyway in '88, but, predictably, his bid went nowhere, and he was out of the race after dismal showings in Iowa and New Hampshire. Bush lost only one primary and caucus—finishing third, behind Bob Dole and Pat Robertson in Iowa—and won the White House in the fall.

But the reverberations of Reagan's '80 decision could still be felt after that. Bush lost his presidency after one term, when, as a recession took hold, voters decided that he was hopelessly out of touch on the economic issues. But Kemp, who'd been tapped by Bush for the previously low-profile job of HUD secretary, actually emerged as one of the few stars of the Bush administration, celebrated by the media for his deep interest in improving inner-city life and the innovative solutions ("enterprise zones") that he'd thought up. Kemp's ability to show precisely the kind of concern and engagement that Bush failed to show raised an obvious question: Would the G.O.P. have lost the White House in '92 if Kemp—and not Bush—had been the candidate in '88?

Kemp's performance in the Bush years turned him into the initial favorite for the G.O.P.'s 1996 nomination. A December 1992 poll put him in first place among the potential field, at 20 percent. (Dole was second at 19 percent and Jim Baker was third, at 12 percent.)

In 1993 and 1994, Kemp aggressively positioned himself for the race. His moment, it seemed, might finally arrive. But then, weeks before the '94 election, he traveled to California to oppose Proposition 187, a referendum that called for illegal immigrants and their children to be denied all state services. The initiative was massively popular with the G.O.P. base, which greeted Kemp's high-profile move with scorn and contempt. (John McCain received roughly the same treatment this decade when he pushed his immigration reform plan.)

In January '95, Kemp announced that he wouldn't run in '96. The party was changing; supply-side evangelism alone wouldn't be enough for the new Republican base. Dole ended up winning the nomination and making Kemp his running mate, but the duo was doomed to defeat from the get-go. And after '96, Kemp's days as a serious national political player were over.

On the day that he died, three top Republicans—Mitt Romney, Eric Cantor and Jeb Bush—kicked off a drive to make the Republican Party appealing to the masses once again. But more than a decade ago, when he spoke out against Proposition 187, Kemp recognized the self-destructive path on which the G.O.P. was embarking. Had his party listened to him then, Republicans might not now be in such an awful predicament. And they might have listened to him back then had he been their president, and not just a former congressman and HUD secretary. And he might have been their president if only Reagan had gone with his gut in July of 1980.

In a speech at Georgetown University, Barack Obama cautiously noted that "we are starting to generate signs of economic progress." That followed Ben Bernanke's declaration that "we have seen tentative signs that the sharp decline in economic activity may be slowing. A leveling out of economic activity is the first step toward economic recovery."

On Sunday's Meet the Press, Larry Summers, Obama's chief economic adviser, sounded the same theme, stressing that there are plenty of tough times ahead but that after "a period when everything was negative, there [is] now some mixture in the indicators."

It should go without saying that these tentative rays of hope may prove to be mirages—and that we have not yet even come close to the bottom and that a turnaround is nowhere in sight.

But, at least for a moment, let's accept that the recession will soon end and a recovery—maybe a long and very slow one, but a recovery nonetheless—will soon commence.

Logically, it would seem to offer Obama a chance to pull off the impossible and to maintain the stratospheric approval ratings he's racked up in his early months in office. After all, voters have made it clear that they view rescuing the economy as Obama's chief responsibility and their chief concern. If, in the wake of his stimulus package and bank rescue plan, a recovery were to begin, it should follow that he'll be showered with praise and affection from a grateful public. Right?

Well, no.

There are several reasons for this, but the biggest is simply that it takes a long time for economists to recognize when a recovery has actually begun, and even longer for the public to feel like the economy has improved. It is entirely possible for a recovery to proceed for more than a year with no one knowing it—and with voters growing more and more fed up with what they perceive as the failure of their leaders to address the situation.

A classic example of this phenomenon played out in the early 1990s, when the U.S. economy plunged into a recession for reasons that are still debated. Some pointed to the savings and loan crisis, some to the market crash of 1987, and others pinned the blame on high oil process caused by the Gulf War.

Whatever the culprit, the National Bureau of Economic Research announced in April 1991 that a recession had begun in July 1990. (Similar lag time was evident in the current crisis; it wasn't until four months ago that the same bureau finally declared that a recession had begun in December 2007.) In April '91, the nation was just returning its attention to domestic matters after the morale-boosting success of Operation Desert Storm. In March '91, even after nearly a year of slow but steady unemployment growth, President George H. W. Bush's approval rating stood near 90 percent.

But those numbers dropped precipitously over the next year, as unemployment continued to climb and Americans grew more and more convinced that their leader was out of touch with their concerns and incapable of mustering an effective response to the economic morass. Bush tried to push a recovery package through the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress, but was rebuffed. By May 1992, unemployment stood at 7.8 percent, and Bush's approval rating had slipped nearly 50 points.

All of this created a golden opportunity for Democrats in the 1992 election. In the wake of Desert Storm, every big-name Democrat, from Mario Cuomo to Al Gore, had taken his name out of the '92 mix, believing Bush to be invulnerable. That made it possible for Bill Clinton to secure the nomination and, as voters slowly became convinced that the economy was close to ruin, to use his sunny charm and "I feel your pain" empathy to connect with dispirited voters.

Clinton promised to "focus on the economy like a laser beam" and effectively turned his fall race against Bush into a referendum on the president's handling of the seemingly endless recession. Given that one poll near the election found that just 14 percent of Americans believed the country was heading in the right direction, Clinton easily won and Bush finished with the lowest share of the popular vote for any incumbent president since William Howard Taft in 1912.

The catch: It turns out the entire 1992 campaign, from Clinton's October '91 announcement of candidacy all the way through his November 3, 1992, triumph, was conducted during an economic recovery. Not that you would have ever known this from the candidates' rhetoric, the media's coverage, just about every public opinion poll, and many of the available economic statistics. But in late December '92, just weeks before Clinton's inaugural, the good old National Bureau of Economic Research announced that the recession had, in fact, ended in March '91—a month before the bureau had originally declared the recession under way.

One reason no one seemed to notice the recovery was that unemployment, a notoriously lagging indicator, continued to rise well into '92, peaking at 7.8 percent late that spring and still hovering at 7.3 percent on Election Day. And it's not like the bureau's declaration changed the public's mood overnight; Americans remained apprehensive about the economy well into 1993, even as unemployment slowly ticked downward.

But the bureau was right: The worst was over, and it had been over for some time. And yet Bush, who was ridiculed throughout the '92 campaign when he tried to argue that the economic tide was turning, still paid with his job for his supposed failure to reverse the recession.

Obama's present situation isn't entirely analogous to Bush's, of course. This downturn is more severe, and its origins more clear. Plus, unlike Bush, Obama has taken highly visible steps to combat the recession; Bush's plans just died in Congress. And most importantly, Obama won't face the voters for more than three years; if a recovery begins later this year, there will be time for it to sink in with voters before the 2012 election.

Still, Bush's example shouldn't be ignored by Obama or his supporters. Even if the president has made all the right moves so far and continues to do so, he'll probably be blamed by voters before he gets the credit he deserves.

So dark that a group of academics and polling professionals spent the last months piecing together a dense study of last year's pre-primary polling, in large part to explain what went wrong in New Hampshire. Released this week, their findings point to an assortment of ho-hum factors—"variations in weighting procedures," "patterns of non-response," and "variations in likely voter models" are among them—that might have produced the botched call. 

Maybe they're right. It's an interesting report. But it mostly misses the point. Rather than devoting exhaustive study to the various technical factors that might have misleadingly inflated Obama's pre-New Hampshire standing, we ought to take a step back and realize that the New Hampshire discrepancies never amounted to the polling/media crisis that they were widely assumed to represent.

To be sure, Clinton's thoroughly unexpected four-point victory was an embarrassment to the pollsters—and to the chorus of reporters and political analysts (present company very much included) who unflinchingly accepted the findings and spent the days before New Hampshire discussing Clinton's imminent demise as a certainty.

But far worse was the hysteria, in the form of pervasive conspiracy theories, intense media introspection and self-flagellation, and baseless campaign narratives that emerged from the shock of Clinton's unlikely triumph.

This began moments after Clinton delivered her victory speech, when Eugene Robinson, appearing on MSNBC, posited that Obama might have been the victim of the so-called "Bradley Effect," by which—supposedly—white voters lie to pollsters when black candidates are running for office, claiming on the phone to be supporters (so as not to appear racist) only to vote the other way in the privacy of the ballot box.

There was some superficial appeal to this thinking—New Hampshire is overwhelmingly white, after all, and hey, something had to be responsible for Obama's shocking loss.

But this ignored the fact that just five nights earlier, tens of thousands of voters in Iowa—a state just as white as New Hampshire—had, in record-shattering numbers, given up their evenings to attend meetings at which they publicly declared their allegiance to Obama, who performed slightly better in the final caucus results than previous polling had suggested. Where was the Bradley Effect, keeping the white Iowan public in their living rooms that night?

More importantly, it ignored the fact that the Bradley Effect really hasn't been documented that well. Supposedly, the disappearance of Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley's polling lead on Election Day in 1982 was attributable to such white treachery. But there were other factors at work that day, too. Nor was the Bradley Effect a prominent factor in the 26 years between Bradley's California loss and Obama's New Hampshire defeat. Harold Ford, for instance, a black Democrat running for the Senate in Tennessee in 2006, found no drop-off between his pre-election standing and the final results. None of this means that racism doesn't affect black candidates; it only suggests that citing the Bradley Effect as a vehicle for such racism is dubious.

For the rest of the campaign, clear through the primary season (when Obama comfortably won the most overwhelmingly white states in the union) and all the way until the eve of the general election, the New Hampshire "example" was routinely cited in the press—all because the pre-primary polls had been wrong.

In the end, of course, there was no Bradley Effect, during the rest of the Democratic primaries or in November. And, notably, this week's exhaustive report found no evidence that it had been at work during the New Hampshire primary. (Again, this is not to say that racism didn't cost Obama votes in 2008—it clearly did—but these were not voters who were hiding their opposition to him, which is how the Bradley Effect supposedly works.)

Through all of this, a simple, logical and non-technical, albeit unsexy, explanation for the New Hampshire discrepancies was there for anyone willing to consider history: It was just New Hampshire being New Hampshire.

Polling before the New Hampshire primary is always volatile—extremely so. The main reason for this is that the state's contest comes after the Iowa caucuses. And those caucus results, filtered through obsessive media coverage, invariably alter on a wide scale the perceptions of New Hampshire voters. It's called the Iowa bounce, or as George H. W. Bush put it in 1980 (when he went from trailing in New Hampshire by 19 points to leading by six in the days after scoring an upset win in Iowa): "the Big Mo."

Bush ended up losing the '80 New Hampshire primary to Ronald Reagan in a landslide. The Big Mo evaporated when Reagan staged his "I paid for this microphone!" moment at a Nashua debate. Back then, there were five weeks between Iowa and New Hampshire. After the debate, Bush's numbers did nothing but bleed, until his ultimate loss—by nearly 30 points—was no surprise. Overall, though, his example is indicative of New Hampshire polling volatility—a journey from 19 points down, to six up, to 27 behind, all in the course of a few weeks.

Since '80, the Iowa-New Hampshire window has narrowed considerably. By '88, when Bush again sought the G.O.P. nod, it was down to just eight days. That was enough time for Bob Dole, who scored a decisive victory in Iowa (with Bush, the sitting vice president finishing a humiliating third, behind Pat Robertson) to turn a pre-Iowa double-digit deficit in New Hampshire into a slight lead—33 to 30 percent over Bush, according to an ABC News poll taken in the final three days before the '88 New Hampshire vote. Other outlets found the same result: a slight Dole lead or an outright tie.

The trend seemed obvious, and the press began playing up Bush's demise. "The senator from Kansas spent most of the day stumping the state with the lighthearted assurance of a frontrunner," The New York Times wrote of Dole's campaign activity on the day before the primary. Members of Bush's own campaign (much like Clinton's last year) happily played along, too. As Dole erased Bush's lead within two days of the Iowa result, a Bush aide told The Washington Post: "Six days is not enough time to turn this colossus around if we are sliding down that slippery a slope."

Final result: Bush 38, Dole 28.

But that's the New Hampshire primary: extreme volatility triggered by the Iowa result mixed with a short campaign window (down to just five days in '08). No conspiracy theories necessary.

They both had the same basic goal that President Obama had in mind when he took a seat on Jay Leno's Tonight Show couch last night.

But the evolution in political messaging that resulted in Obama becoming the first sitting president ever to appear on a late night talk show really kicked into gear in 1992, when Bill Clinton saw a perfect opportunity in late-night and daytime talk shows—previously considered beneath the dignity of a president or a would-be president—to bypass the traditional news media and to showcase his warmth, empathy and other compelling human traits.

Nineteen ninety-two was also that year that Ross Perot, previously a little-known Texas billionaire, used a February appearance on Larry King Live to incite a grass-roots fervor that, by June, had him running in first place in a three-way presidential race with Clinton and George H. W. Bush. The approach had a similar effect on Clinton, who emerged in April '92 from a bloody Democratic primary process, his standing with general-election voters undermined by a string of scandals. Even Democrats believed he wouldn't be electable in the fall. But as the spring wore on and voters began to see him in nontraditional settings, Clinton's numbers began to improve.

Meanwhile, Bush stubbornly resisted making playing the same game; to do so, he believed, would be to lower himself. After Clinton and Perot both appeared (separately) on Phil Donahue's syndicated daytime show, Bush told reporters that he would reject the program's invitation "because I'm the president." (Clinton also had appeared on Donahue for a one-hour primary debate with his Democratic opponent, Jerry Brown.)

Bush's obstinacy played right into the Clinton and Perot messages, which painted the incumbent president as a tired and walled-off symbol of the old ways. This contrast came to a head in early June, when Clinton appeared on Arsenio Hall's syndicated late-night talk show. Instead of just sitting down and chatting, Clinton first grabbed a saxophone and donned a pair of sunglasses (handed to him by an aide on his way out to the stage) to join Hall's in-house band for a rendition of "Heartbreak Hotel." The image, replayed endlessly on television for days to come, reinforced the hip and vigorous image Clinton was trying to create.

This positive press prompted the White House, finally, to announce that Bush himself had reconsidered and would "probably do the same kind of media as the other candidates," as spokesman Marlin Fitzwater put it. Asked by a reporter if Bush would also go on Arsenio, Fitzwater replied: "'With that exception."

Whoops. This prompted a weeklong war of words between Hall and the White House. On his show the next night, Hall responded directly: ''Excuse me, George Herbert, irregular-heart-beating, read-my-lying-lipping, slipping-in-the-polls, do-nothing, deficit-raising, make-less-money-than-Millie-the-White-House-dog-last-year, Quayle-loving, sushi-puking Bush. I don't remember inviting your ass to my show. I don't need you on my show. My ratings are higher than yours.''

Bush himself refused to return fire, but top Republicans complained to the higher-ups behind Hall's show. Instead of backing down, he upped the ante a few nights later: "I got 'dissed' by the president. At least I'm in good company, though. Now I've joined the ranks of the homeless, the unemployed and the middle class. So I don't feel so bad. . . . Maybe he'll do Donahue, when the topic is 'relatives of people involved in savings and loan scandals'. . . . So I guess that's two houses he won't be in: my house, and come November, he won't be in the White House."

The Bush-Hall showdown ended there, but the damage had been done for the White House. Instead of simply relenting and doing a few talk show appearances, Bush—through Fitzwater—had sparked a media firestorm that reinforced for millions the stubborn old fuddy-duddy image that the Clinton campaign was peddling. Eventually, Bush did appear on a few network morning shows, for "town hall" events. But by then, it didn't matter.

For nearly the entire second Bush presidency, a popular theory has held that the first President Bush is, at least in the seclusion of his Kennebunkport and Houston homes, deeply distressed by his son's stewardship, especially his decision to invade Iraq (a choice that Bush 41 pointedly refused to make during the 1991 Gulf War).

Whenever he's been asked, George H. W. Bush has, not surprisingly, scoffed at this theorizing and expressed full faith and confidence in his son and the direction he chose for the country. But every now and then, clues have supposedly emerged that have betrayed the elder Bush's actual state of mind. Like the now-famous Wall Street Journal op-ed from the summer of 2004 in which Brent Scowcroft, Bush 41's confidant and foreign policy soul mate (not to mention the co-author of his memoirs) warned against an invasion of Iraq. Or the moment two years ago, when Bush 41 broke down while paying tribute to his son Jeb—evidence, some suggested, of an old man heartbroken that the wrong son had made it to the White House.

There's a certain allure to this kind of thinking. Between his academic shortcomings, his spotty military record, his business failures and his heavy drinking, it's easy to paint Bush 43's presidency as merely the latest in a lifelong string of failures to live up to the example set by his father. And it's just as easy to imagine the elder Bush haunted by the painful irony that the wisdom of his own most questioned decision as president—to stay out of Baghdad—has been vindicated by the tragedy of his son's "preemptive" war.

With his interview, Hume had an opportunity to delve, however delicately, into some of these questions. Sure, it would be futile to come out and ask Bush 43 if he thinks the Iraq war was a mistake or if his son has been a screw-up as president. Not only would Bush have provided his customary "of course not" response, he also would have clammed up for the rest of the interview, maybe even walked out.

But there are ways to get into it, and Hume seemingly had a perfect opportunity toward the end of the interview, when, seated in the Oval Office with both Bushes (each of them, presumably, relaxed by the anodyne queries Hume had been soft-balling their way), he innocuously asked Bush 41 for his "most vivid memory of your time in this office—something that happened in this very room."

The former president brought up the end of the Gulf War.

"Well, I can't think of many," he said, "but I remember Colin Powell reaching under this desk and pulling out the telephone to call (General Norman) Schwarzkopf to see if the mission had been accomplished. After that—they said it's time to shut down this war."

He continued: "One hundred hours, we'd done what we said we wanted to do, and he called up—and that one sticks in my mind as a dramatic moment."

Given all of the speculation about his opinion of his son's presidency, it's rather amazing that Bush would have brought up the end of the Gulf War—the very moment when he ruled out expanding the mission from a simple liberation of Kuwait into a full-blown invasion of Iraq.

If ever a follow-up, however innocuous, were called for, this was the moment—some effort to coax the former president into elaborating on the thought he'd just expressed. Why was that so dramatic? What thoughts were going through your mind? What kinds of decisions did you face that day?

Instead, Hume changed the subject, asking both Bushes to recall a private conversation they'd had on the day of Bush 43's 2001 inaugural, and the moment was lost. In the course of the interview, Hume also covered the following topic: Whether Bush 41 wishes his son were moving to Houston after his presidency; whether the cane he now uses will be permanent; whether it's true that he insisted all men wear jackets and ties in the Oval office; and whether Bush 43 wants his father to do any more skydiving.

It's certainly reasonable that the first-ever extended interview with a father-son team of presidents would contain its share of human interest questions. It's also not surprising in the least that a Fox News interview with a pair of Republican presidents would opt for fluff over the kind of tough questioning it used when Bill Clinton was a guest. The prospect of that kind of grilling is probably the chief reason why there has never been a Bush-Bush interview with any other outlet.

Had he been inclined to take advantage of the moment, Hume could have used the fact that the first Bush brought up the end of the Gulf War to prod some kind of meaningful statement out of the second one.

Instead, when the interview ended, we knew as much as we did before. It's still tempting to believe that George H. W. Bush is privately devastated by his son's choices. But there's still not a shred of meaningful proof that he actually is.

Obviously, no one would argue with that, and it’s certainly smart politics for Obama to talk in such terms, as a way of tempering the public’s outsized expectations for his presidency. But, as the rest of the interview made clear, the country’s dire economic conditions – which have worsened significantly since Election Day, when they were plenty bad – seem likely to alter Obama’s presidential agenda, with potentially harmful effects on his popularity and his clout with Congress.

For the incoming president, a cautionary tale can be found in the example of Bill Clinton, who came to office 16 years ago amid an apparent recession and with a promise to focus “like a laser beam” on the economy. But Clinton’s presidency got blown badly off course in his early months in office, in part because of his chaotic and disorganized style, but also because the agenda he began pushing wasn’t quite the same as the one he’d campaigned on.

In Clinton’s case, the culprit was the budget deficit and national debt he inherited from George H.W. Bush. The issue of the national debt had never stirred much passion from voters before ’92 – Walter Mondale campaigned on it in 1984 and lost 49 states – and it hasn’t stirred much since then. But in ’92, with the early ‘90s recession still exacting a painful toll on Main Street, a popular sense emerged that the country was, in essence, paying the price for a decade of overindulgence marked by massive tax cuts and exhaustive spending. The debt, which had stood at less than $1 trillion in 1980 and exploded to more than $4 trillion by ’92, came to symbolize this idea.

It was a sentiment that two unlikely politicians, Democrat Paul Tsongas and independent Ross Perot, tapped into to stunning effect. Tsongas went first, pitching a message of self-sacrifice and generational responsibility and, despite his utter lack of charisma, briefly emerging as the front-runner for the Democratic nomination. When his campaign sputtered, Perot stepped in and made the debt the centerpiece of his two campaigns (he dropped out in July and re-entered at the start of October). Perot’s 19 percent showing on Election Day (which could well have been much higher had he not dropped out over the summer) still stands as the best performance by an independent candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.

But as a candidate, Clinton didn’t project the same debt hawkishness. While Perot and Tsongas called for tax hikes and sacrifice, Clinton maintained that he’d be able to deliver a sweeping middle-class tax cut and warned that, when it came to attacking the debt, “there’s a danger of doing too much, too fast.” He also promised an extensive economic stimulus package.

Between his election in November and the start of his administration, though, Clinton was forced to confront new realities – and realities that he’d intentionally ignored during the campaign. The economy, as dreadful as it still seemed to everyday Americans, was actually improving. Economists would later conclude that the recession had actually ended in November 1991 and that the country had spent ’92 in recovery. And the giant budget deficit that Tsongas, Perot and others had warned about had to be addressed. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and others quickly convinced Clinton that the bond markets that were so key to the burgeoning recovery would respond well to an aggressive attack on government debt.

So Clinton, days after assuming office and after his teams spent weeks laying the groundwork in the press, went on national television to announce that his middle-class tax cut plan, so central to his campaign message, was off the table. Sacrifice, the buzz word that he’d avoided as a candidate, was suddenly in. An economic program was drafted that called for a host of income tax hikes and other new taxes and fees. In presenting it to Congress, Clinton over and over again used the euphemism “contributions” – prompting Republicans to ask sarcastically how the IRS might react if average citizens said they didn’t feel like “contributing” this year.

The stimulus plan was essentially scrapped, too. Instead of crafting a detailed recovery program and working intensely to push it through Congress, Clinton opted instead to go through the motions. A $16 billion bill loaded up with the pet pork projects of every influential senator and congressman was cobbled together, allowing Clinton to claim he was living up to his campaign promise. But Republicans shredded it with ease and killed it in the Senate.

By June of 1993, Clinton was gracing the cover of Time magazine under the headline “The Incredible Shrinking President” and his entire agenda was knocked off track. It took all of his political capital (and threats that breaking with him would sink his presidency) to prod just enough congressional Democrats into voting for his first budget, which Republicans said amounted to “the largest tax increase in the history of the world.” That package, which is now celebrated for creating the foundation for the stock market boom of the ‘90s, was at the time reviled, further eroding Clinton’s shaky public support.

To most Americans, Clinton had promised a pain-free solution to their economic woes. Instead, he’d delivered pain, and broke his word. His negligible political capital undermined what was supposed to be his signature achievement, health care reform, and also led to the embarrassing defeat of a crime bill just months before the ’94 midterm elections – in which his party paid dearly for Clinton’s shaky first two years.

The situation now for Obama, obviously, is not the same. In ’93, the country was quickly realizing that the economy was actually improving and that the tough days were over. Today, though, it seems clear that America’s economic woes are only beginning (only a week ago economists officially notified us that we are in a recession) – and are far more ominous and systemic than those caused by the early ‘90s recession.

But like Clinton, Obama is now shifting in response to the changing conditions. Over and over in his campaign, he stressed that he’d undo the tax cuts that the wealthiest Americans received from George W. Bush. Lately, though, he’s been sending a different signal, arguing that he didn’t actually endorse undoing them in the campaign – he merely meant letting them expire as scheduled in 2011. On “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Obama refused to be pinned down on the question. It seems he’s been persuaded, like Clinton during his transition, that one of his signature economic agenda ideas would be very bad medicine, and now he’s trying to walk away from it.

He’s also poised to blow a hole in the already-enormous budget deficit, a necessary evil, it would seem, given the state of the economy – a far cry from ’93, when Clinton realized that stimulus wasn’t really needed.

“We understand that we’ve got to provide a blood infusion to the patient right now to make sure the patient is stabilized,” Obama said on Sunday. “So that means we can’t worry in the short term about the deficit.”

He probably won’t pay a short term price for that, but it could set him up for bigger problems down the road. Plus, there’s the whole matter of health care. Like Clinton in ’92, Obama has long promised to finally bring about universal coverage. Clinton’s hopes were ruined by his poor political standing. Obama may have to deal with that too: Once his honeymoon wears off, an awful economy figures to drag down his approval ratings quickly. (Remember where Ronald Reagan’s numbers were during the 1981-’82 recession?) Plus, with Obama likely to be forced to invest considerable capital in passing a massive stimulus package early on, he may find all of his favors and I.O.U.’s with Congress exhausted by the time he gets around to health care – something that Clinton also found in ’93.

The silver lining for Obama, of course, is that popular two-term presidents often have rocky starts. Clinton and Reagan were both handed brutal setbacks in their first midterm elections, but recovered quite well. George H.W. Bush, by contrast, was quite popular early in his presidency, only to lose re-election in ’92.

It may be that Obama’s prophecy about the economy will also hold true for his political standing: It will get worse before it gets better.

Mr. Scowcroft’s resulting op-ed, published in The Wall Street Journal and titled “Don’t Attack Saddam,” presciently decreed that any invasion “is certain to divert us for some indefinite period from our war on terrorism.” It fell on deaf ears in the White House, and the war commenced a few months later.

The elder Mr. Bush’s hand again seemed to be at work four years later, when, with public frustration with the war reaching its breaking point, James A. Baker took the reins of the Iraq Study Group, the bipartisan panel that proposed a strategy for withdrawing troops from Iraq and reengaging diplomatically with the rest of the Middle East. This, too, was ignored by the president.

George H. W. Bush played no public role in either episode, but they both nonetheless confirmed just how radically the second President Bush had departed from the worldview of his father, who passed on an open invitation to invade Baghdad and who made maintaining relationships with the rest of the world a priority.

Perhaps the most ironic legacy of George W. Bush’s presidency is the service it has done to the reputation of his father, who seemed destined to be remembered as an unaccomplished one-termer when he lost his reelection bid (with just 37 percent of the vote) in 1992. By serially violating the basic principles that informed his father’s foreign policy and incurring such ghastly consequences, the younger Mr. Bush has stirred a widespread reassessment: The leadership that Americans took for granted under his father now seems like uncommon wisdom from a better, bygone era.

And now, with only weeks remaining in the second Bush administration, that sentiment is being validated by the incoming Democratic president, a man who opposed the Iraq war back when Mr. Scowcroft did; who has repeatedly lamented that “we have taken our eye off the ball” in Afghanistan because of it; and who has unapologetically championed the kind of aggressive diplomacy endorsed by the Iraq Study Group.

On Monday, Barack Obama, after much anticipation, trotted out the principal players on his national security team. Hillary Clinton, his selection for secretary of state, generated the most attention, but the bigger story could be found in two of his other picks: James L. Jones as national security adviser, and Robert Gates, who will keep his post as defense secretary.

Both are well known in the Washington world—Mr. Jones, a former NATO supreme allied commander, was once the Marine liaison to the Senate, and Mr. Gates spent years with the C.I.A. (and was the agency’s director under George H. W. Bush) and served on the National Security Council in the 1970s—and both are associated with the realist thinking that prevailed under the first President Bush.

Consider Mr. Gates, whose selection as defense secretary in late 2006 was seen as one of George W. Bush’s very few nods to his father. In many ways, he is a protégé of both Mr. Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, the two realists who served as national security advisor when Mr. Gates was with the N.S.C. Even though Mr. Brzezinski is a Democrat who served under Jimmy Carter, he has made his respect for George H. W. Bush clear, endorsing him in 1988 and rating him as America’s best post-Cold War president in his 2007 book, Second Chance.

Mr. Gates was also a member of the Iraq Study Group when he was nominated for defense in ’06.

Then there’s Mr. Jones, who with his West Wing office and near-constant access to the president, will arguably enjoy a more intimate working relationship with Mr. Obama than Mrs. Clinton will. He has echoed Mr. Obama’s view that the Iraq war has hindered U.S. efforts in Afghanistan. Perhaps more interesting, he is deeply uncomfortable with Donald Rumsfeld. He refused back in ’01 even to interview for the position of chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Mr. Rumsfeld, and subsqequently declined several other opportunities to join the Bush administration.

After his ’92 defeat, George H. W. Bush took to declaring in an almost pleading voice that “history will remember us kindly.” Whether history will do so is still unclear, but Barack Obama clearly does.

skornacki@observer.com