Democratic Senate campaign features images of George W. Bush

Former President George W. Bush makes two appearances, via old photos, in a 2024 Michigan Senate race campaign ad. Not for likely GOP nominee Mike Rogers, a House member and strong supporter during Bush’s 2001-09 presidency, but for the probable Democratic Senate nominee, Rep. Elissa Slotkin.

The television ad is an extension of a bipartisan-leaning strategy Slotkin has employed since her initial win, in 2018, of a House district that takes in the state capital of Lansing and stretches to the northwestern Detroit exurbs. Slotkin has styled herself as a centrist who reaches out to Republicans.

She’s now running for Senate, to replace retiring Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), who first won the seat in 2000. Both parties view the Michigan Senate race as critical. Democrats need a victory to have any chance of holding their majority, currently at a narrow 51-49. Republicans see Michigan as a ripe pickup opportunity in an already-favorable Senate map.

The Senate race overlaps with the presidential campaign, with Michigan earning its billing as a perennial swing state. President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump need it to win the White House in November.

The Slotkin campaign’s featuring of Bush in photos shows the touch-and-go nature of statewide races in Michigan and the at least limited rehabilitation of the 43rd president’s public image. Bush, after all, left office deeply unpopular amid the Great Recession and bailouts of banks and car companies that seemed to contradict the free market principles he had long espoused, along with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other foreign and domestic crises.

Slotkin, a former Defense Department and CIA official, was deployed to Iraq for three tours over five years. During that period, Slotkin had national security assignments in the Bush White House and the administration of his Democratic successor, former President Barack Obama. Her campaign ad features side-by-side photos in the Oval Office with Bush and Obama.

And while Bush was a target of Democratic anger, even hatred, in some quarters, during his eight years in office, he’s not exactly viewed as a beloved GOP elder statesman. Many Republicans see him as out of step with the Republican Party’s current incarnation, in the nationalist-populist mold of Trump, who is seeking a comeback against Biden after losing the 2020 race.

In Trump’s winning 2016 campaign, Bush was, in fact, a recurring target of the businessman’s insult-comic routines on social media and campaign rallies. Most of the jabs came during the Republican primary season, when Trump’s rivals included former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, younger brother of the former president and son of an even more stolid symbol of the old GOP establishment, the late President George H.W. Bush.

Trump in 2016 frequently disparaged the whole Bush family.

“Frankly, I think the son, being loyal to the father, I think he really wanted to go into Iraq, even if it wasn’t the right thing to do,” Trump said in a February 2016 CNN town hall.

“They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction, but there were none. And they knew there were none,” Trump added at the time in a statement that could have been uttered in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, when Obama emerged on top, having been an Iraq War critic from the start in contrast to his chief rival, then-Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York.

From Bushie to MAGA Mike

During Bush’s presidency, Rogers, the former Republican congressman and GOP Senate nominee-in-waiting, would have been a natural to tout his ties to Bush. A House member from 2001-15, Rogers was elected to Congress at the same time that Bush won the presidency. Both got to Washington by the electoral skin of their teeth. Bush in 2000 famously won Florida by 537 votes out of nearly 6 million cast, handing him the presidency after more than a month-plus of court battles. Rogers in 2000, at the time a state senator, won the year’s closest House race. He prevailed over his Democratic opponent by 111 votes out of nearly 298,000 cast.

Rogers, a square-jawed former FBI agent who earlier served in the Army, was, two decades ago, out of central casting as a War on Terror-era Republican lawmaker. He supported the 2002 Iraq invasion resolution in Congress and was a strong proponent of a robust and activist foreign policy, which he capped by chairing the House Intelligence Committee during his last four years in office.

These days, though, Rogers is more like MAGA Mike. He’s recast himself as a robust critic of federal law enforcement, routinely denigrating his old agency, the FBI, as a deep state tool that targets Trump.

“I don’t recognize this justice system,” Rogers said in his September 2003 Senate announcement video. “Look, I’m for holding everyone accountable if they’ve broken the law, no matter who they are. But what we are seeing right now is a politically motivated DOJ waging war against the leading Republican presidential candidate on behalf of President Biden. This is a dangerous precedent, and it needs to be stopped.”

Trump has endorsed Rogers. In a March Truth Social post, Trump called Rogers “highly respected” and noted his military service. “Mike will work closely with me to enact our America First Policies,” Trump wrote. “He will tirelessly fight to Secure the Border, Stop Inflation, Grow the Economy, Strengthen our Military / Veteran Support, and Protect and Defend our always under siege Second Amendment.”

Rogers had previously seemingly retired from politics. After leaving Congress, he hosted a nationally syndicated radio show for a time and the series Declassified on CNN, where he was a national security commentator. Rogers and his wife moved to Florida, and he became a defense lobbyist. He now says his home is again in Michigan.

Reputation rehabilitation

Bush, since leaving the White House in January 2009, has remained largely silent. His presidency had ended on a bitter note amid the worst recession since the Great Depression and a series of wars.

As the economy soured and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on, Bush hit a record low in the spring of 2008, when nearly two-thirds of voters said they saw him in an unfavorable light. That marked a dramatic fall from his 90% approval rating after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Bush bottomed out, per the Gallup poll, at 25% in early November 2008, just as the nation was electing Obama as president, on promises largely to reverse Bush’s actions at home and abroad. That was just a point above President Richard Nixon’s record-low approval rating on the eve of his August 1974 resignation over the Watergate scandal. By the time of Obama’s inauguration, Bush’s approval rating had ticked up to 33% in the Gallup poll.

Since then, Bush has become known for his painting more than public pronouncements on political and policy issues. After reading an essay by Winston Churchill in 2012, amid that year’s presidential election season, Bush made the unexpected choice of starting a postpresidential career as a painter.

Churchill wrote that “painting is a companion with whom one may hope to walk a great part of life’s journey,” noted author Jared Cohen in his 2024 book Life After Power: Seven Presidents and Their Search for Purpose Beyond the White House.

Bush, in an interview with Cohen, said he’s content out of office.

“When it’s over, it’s over. I don’t miss it,” Bush told the author.

As for his legacy as president, Bush added, “Historians are still writing books about the other George [Washington]. … By the time they get around to me, I’ll be long gone.”

Not that Bush has been completely absent from the political scene. The former president helped talk former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan into running for Senate this year, a tough task even for a popular former state chief executive in one of the nation’s bluest states.

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“Probably the most convincing guy was George Bush, who called me and said that he thought that I had an important voice that was needed for the party,” Hogan said in a March interview after announcing his Senate bid. Bush “thought that there was a missing voice for our party to get back on track to the more Reaganesque bigger-tent party. And he said, you know, even though you probably don’t want to be a senator, we need you.”

In the Michigan Senate race, Slotkin isn’t making any such claims about Bush supporting her Democratic Senate bid. But she may not have to, with photos, if her campaign strategy goes as planned, telling a story of bipartisanship in an age of fierce party-on-party fighting.