Quote of the Day (George H.W. Bush, on Having “More Will Than Wallet”)

“We have more will than wallet; but will is what we need. We will make the hard choices, looking at what we have and perhaps allocating it differently, making our decisions based on honest need and prudent safety. And then we will do the wisest thing of all: We will turn to the only resource we have that in times of need always grows—the goodness and the courage of the American people.”—George H.W. Bush, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1989

The first Bush President spoke prematurely—now, following the economic crisis of this past fall, we really have more will than wallet, in no small measure due to the son who entered the Oval Office and produced a deficit and recession, the extent of which would have staggered the father who had to deal with both in his single term in office.

It’s intriguing to read this 1989 address written by then-speechwriter and current columnist Peggy Noonan (who, since then, has become critical of the Bush now departing the White House). It’s even more interesting to consider the circumstances surrounding it. Where Obama will be calling to mind Lincoln, Bush was invoking George Washington, even using the same Bible on which the first President took the oath of office.

In contrast to today, when despots and terrorists feel newly empowered, a sense of hope infuses this speech, a belief that freedom is an irresistible force sweeping all before it. It was several years into Gorbachev’s program of glasnost, and only 11 months until the Berlin Wall would come tumbling down.

Most of all, there’s the rhetoric. Some of the sentences and phrases could show up just as easily in Obama’s address with nobody being able to tell the difference in tone:

* “There is but one just use of power, and it is to serve people.”

* “My friends, we are not the sum of our possessions. They are not the measure of our lives.”

* "America is never wholly herself unless she is engaged in high moral principle.”

“I am speaking of a new engagement in the lives of others, a new activism, hands-on and involved, that gets the job done.”

This Bush would not have urged Americans to go shopping after 9/11. I still believe he was involved up to his eyeballs in the Iran-Contra scandal. But in his belief that there had to be more to government and the meaning of people’s lives than getting and spending, he was anything but the successor to Reagan that many conservative Republicans wanted, or that his son strove to embody throughout most of his Presidency.

The man who delivered this speech was not the politician who by the end of his term practically twisted and turned himself into a pretzel for the thankless task of satisfying both the Religious Right and self-styled “revolutionary” Newt Gingrich.

Instead, he sounded like the youth who took to heart what he heard Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson say at the commencement address at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., about the American soldier being “brave without being brutal, self-reliant without boasting, becoming a part of irresistible might without losing faith in individual liberty.”

It’s that sense of reserve, humility and service to others in Washington that has gone missing and needs to be recovered if we hope to recover our moral balance, never mind our economic bearings.