George W. Bush's New Cause: AIDS in Africa Eleanor Clift - The Daily Beast
go to original July 22, 2012

George W. Bush photographed holding a baby at Ngundu Health Center in July (Joseph Mwenda/AFP/GettyImages)

Now that he’s been out of the White House for almost four years, George W. Bush’s post-presidency is coming into sharper relief, and there’s a lot for his critics to admire.

Together with Laura Bush, he spent the July 4th week in Africa, where he helped build a wing on a hospital and refurbish a clinic to detect and treat cervical cancer. His jeans splattered with paint and with a baseball cap shielding his eyes from the sun, the former president said his work on global-health issues is a natural outgrowth of the freedom agenda he championed in Washington, noting with his characteristic bluntness: “One aspect of freedom is for people to be free from disease.”

This was Bush’s second trip to Africa since leaving office (Laura’s third), and his emotional ties to the continent reach back to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief that he put in place 10 years ago to help stop the transmission of the AIDS virus from mothers to children. It was transformative for Africa—and for also for Bush, who found a cause that he could take way beyond the White House, one that would become a building block in the next chapter of his life. Laura Bush is speaking at next week’s AIDS conference in Washington, the first held in the U.S. now that restrictions have been lifted so people with AIDS can enter this country.

A sympathetic observer familiar with Bush’s thinking, who declined to be identified, says Bush wants his ex-presidency to be “a blend of Jimmy Carter, his father, and a little bit of Bill Clinton, but not too much.” An online photo of Bush, roller in hand to paint a door at a health clinic in Zambia, is reminiscent of Carter’s work building houses with Habitat for Humanity. But Karen Hughes, a longtime confidante of Bush, bristles at the notion that her ex-boss is modeling himself after any of his predecessors.

“He is very much charting his own course,” she says, “and it’s a continuation of things he really cares about going back to his term as governor. He really believes in the biblical imperative, ‘To whom much is given, much is expected.’”

The Bush Institute is being erected along with his presidential library on 25 acres of land on the Southern Methodist University campus, Laura Bush’s alma mater. It’s at the institute’s temporary offices in Dallas where the former president can be reached most days—“very early in the morning, like 6:45 he shows up,” Hughes told The Daily Beast. “I spoke to him this morning at 7:30 and he was probably on his third cup of coffee.”

The institute houses a variety of programs under the broad headings of global health, education reform, economic growth, and advancing human freedom, areas that advance Bush’s interests and reflect his presidency. Laura Bush oversees a women’s initiative that is hosting its first class of fellows from Egypt, activists who are critical to the country’s fledgling democracy movement. When planning the institute, Bush instructed, “I don’t want a think tank; I want a do tank.” 

Bush left office in 2009 with an approval rating of just 22 percent, the lowest in modern times for a departing president. He supports Mitt Romney, but is so determined to stay off the public stage that he sent word late Friday that he will not attend the Republican convention in Tampa. His father has declined for health reasons, and Bush won’t disappoint too many Republicans by deciding to stay home. “He’s putting distance between himself and partisan politics, which is probably good for him and his party,” says Jack Pitney, professor of American politics at Claremont McKenna University. “People will think better of him if he focuses on philanthropy—and most Republicans would be happy to escape his embrace.”

During an event Tuesday with the Hoover Institution, Bush said his two terms were “awesome” but he had had his fill of Washington. “I crawled out of the swamp and I’m not crawling back in,” he said, adding that he would continue to honor his pledge not to speak ill of President Obama or any future successors. Like his father, who forged a friendship with the man who defeated him, Bush the younger gets along famously with Bill Clinton. “It’s nice for them, and it’s also good for the country to see former rivals come together,” says Pitney.

 

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