Politico: “The most obvious way to understand this soap opera is to treat George P. Bush as a prodigal grandson, son, and nephew who has soiled if not betrayed the family tradition. But that would be unfair to the land commissioner, who, from a different perspective, is simply continuing the Bush practice of accommodating oneself to whatever passes for conservative Republicanism at any one moment, as I explained a few years ago:
Poppy [George H.W. Bush’s nickname from childhood] followed in the footsteps of his politician father Prescott Bush, who represented Connecticut for a decade in the U.S. Senate. Prescott was by any measure a moderate — or even liberal — Republican: a despiser of Joseph McCarthy, a close friend of Nelson Rockefeller, and a supporter of civil rights legislation. Even more conspicuously, Poppy’s father was heavily involved in Planned Parenthood (and its predecessor organization, the Birth Control League), and the quintessentially WASP-y cause of family planning.
Poppy continued his father’s commitment to Planned Parenthood (his enthusiasm for contraception was such that he was known as “Rubbers” by his congressional colleagues in the 1960s) until it became a political liability, along with his hyper-Establishment foreign-policy views. By the time he ran for president in 1980, George H.W. had suddenly become “pro-life” and essentially offered himself as a more orthodox conservative alternative to Ronald Reagan (he did not, for example, embrace Reagan’s newfangled supply-side fiscal theories, which he called “voodoo economics”). But in choosing H.W. as his running mate, Reagan defied considerable distrust of the Bush clan among movement conservatives; the move at the 1980 GOP Convention to draft former president Gerald Ford as Reagan’s veep was largely a product of those concerns.
In took eight long years of subservience to Reagan and special attention to the Christian right for George H.W. Bush to become acceptable to conservatives as the 1988 presidential nominee; he got lucky when his top rival Bob Dole offended the anti-tax wing of the GOP by refusing to sign a no-new-taxes pledge just prior to the New Hampshire primary. But then, of course, H.W. ran afoul of his own no-new-taxes pledge as president by agreeing to a bipartisan deficit-reduction deal that had a revenue component. This legendary “Bush betrayal” is what H.W.’s sons had to overcome before pursuing their own national political ambitions.
Jeb was considered the more cerebral, and genuinely ideological, Bush brother in the restoration that began after the 41st president lost his 1992 reelection bid. But when W. won his 1994 gubernatorial race in Texas even as Jeb lost his in Florida the same year, he became the dynastic favorite, and then began a successful effort to convince conservatives that while he was the biological heir of George H.W. Bush, he was the ideological heir of Ronald Reagan. W. had the near-universal backing of movement conservatives in his 2000 nomination contest fight with John McCain and maintained their strong support in his 2004 reelection bid.
Toward the end of his presidency, there was an increasingly powerful conservative backlash against Bush’s management of the Iraq War and his support for comprehensive immigration reform. As his approval ratings collapsed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, a second Bush president found himself on the outs with prevailing opinion on the right. This helped open the door to Trump.”