George W. Bush Will Not Attend Republican National Convention
By JIM RUTENBERG
Former President George W. Bush will be skipping the Republican National Convention this summer, his office said Friday, continuing the relative seclusion – and self-imposed remove — from presidential politics that he has kept since leaving office.
A spokesman for Mr. Bush, Freddy Ford, indicated in a statement on Friday that Mr. Bush had been invited but declined to attend the convention, which starts in late August in Tampa. “President Bush was grateful for the invitation to the Republican National Convention; he supports Governor Romney and wants him to succeed,” he said. “But in keeping with his desire to stay off the political stage at this point in the post-presidency, he respectfully declined the invitation to go to Tampa.”
The news was first reported by Politico Friday afternoon.
Mr. Bush had physically skipped the Republican convention four years ago, appearing only via a remote video feed and becoming the first president in a generation to miss his party’s nominating ceremony. Most modern presidents have attended their party’s first convention after leaving office, including Gerald R. Ford, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Mr. Bush’s father, George Bush. (The elder Mr. Bush, 88, who has a form of Parkinson’s disease, also will not attend either this year.) Exceptions: Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon.
The base of Mr. Bush’s party has drifted even further away from him since he handed the keys to the White House to President Obama. Many of the Republican primary candidates last winter regularly eschewed his spending policies, including his expansion of the Medicare drug benefit. And most of the field – including Mr. Romney – differed with his approach to immigration, which had included a call to create a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants who meet certain conditions, a move conservatives equate with “amnesty.” Mr. Bush has endorsed Mr. Romney, but with decidedly little ceremony. He did so in May while stepping into an elevator, in response to an ABC News crew that had trailed him, saying “I’m for Mitt Romney.”
The two have spoken since, but it has become clear that Mr. Bush will not be campaigning for Mr. Romney in any big way. In an interview posted online by the Hoover Institution this week, Mr. Bush said he has had enough of politics. “I crawled out of the swamp, and I’m not crawling back in,” he said.
