Vice President George Bush raises his arms during a speech at the 1988 Republican National Convention in New Orleans, Louisiana. Shepard Sherbell | Corbis Historical | Getty Images

On domestic policy, the rap sheet on George H.W. Bush read: "inbox president." In the wake of the Reagan Revolution, that translated to passivity and the absence of his own agenda. The 41st president himself confessed struggling with "the vision thing." Yet hindsight shows those assessments sold him short. Large problems landed in his inbox and Bush worked with a Democratic-controlled Congress to resolve them – even if he received scant credit at the time. During his first year in the White House, Bush 41 and Congress enacted legislation to mop up the failing savings and loan industry. Ending that crisis, which festered through the Reagan years, ultimately cost financial institutions and taxpayers $481 billion. But it protected the savings of 25 million customers at insolvent S & Ls. Bush's second year produced bigger achievements.

First, he reached agreement with lawmakers on the Americans with Disabilities Act to outlaw discrimination against the disabled in employment and public accommodations. Then, business lobbies such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Federation of Independent Business warned it would cause economic disaster; today they hail it as a landmark civil rights law. Next, they reached agreement on amendments to the Clean Air Act that eventually tamed the pollution-driven threat of acid rain. It relied on the market-based approach of tradeable emissions credits – an innovative solution that Washington has since proven unable to emulate for the carbon emissions that cause global warming. More significant, they persisted through torturous negotiations toward a compromise to restrain swelling budget deficits. As they battled for the 1980 Republican presidential nomination, Bush accused Reagan of "voodoo economics" for insisting he could balance the budget while cutting taxes and boosting defense spending. Events proved Bush right, and Reagan handed his vice president a larger deficit than he inherited from Jimmy Carter. The S&L cleanup made those deficits worse. The mid-1990 recession darkened the fiscal outlook further. In his own 1988 campaign, Bush had pledged to resist any tax increases. That pleased his party's ascendant, anti-government conservatives, who favored shrinking taxes and spending in tandem. Yet keeping that pledge would have precluded action on deficits. Congressional Democrats, determined to protect government services and benefits their party created during the New Deal and Great Society, opposed relying exclusively on spending cuts.