Reply #11: A family saga of secrecy, oil money and privilege.

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washingtonpost.com
The Ruling Class
A family saga of secrecy, oil money and privilege.

Review by Jonathan Yardley Sunday, January 11, 2004; Page T01

AMERICAN DYNASTY:

Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush
By Kevin Phillips

Viking. 397 pp. $25.95

In this angry, devastating examination of "the House of Bush," Kevin Phillips asks the question that seems to have occurred to no one else: How did these people get so entitled? How is it that a family in no way distinguished by genuine accomplishment, moral and/or political conviction or exceptional intelligence has managed to lay claim as a matter of right to the American presidency, and how is it -- this is the real puzzler -- that the American people seem to have acquiesced in this presumption? How did we manage to put ourselves in the hands of a family that clearly believes it has dynastic stature, with all the privileges and entitlements attendant thereto, and behaves accordingly?

Phillips, an experienced political strategist and former White House aide, is correct to say that what he calls the Bush "restoration" -- the election to the White House in 2000 of George W. Bush, only eight years after the public's emphatic repudiation of his father, George H.W. Bush -- is unprecedented in American history. The two Adams presidents were elected a quarter-century apart and represented different parties, the two Roosevelts were separated by two decades and came from different branches of the family, and any Kennedy dynastic aspirations were thwarted by bizarre twists of fate. Yet even though the first Bush presidency was by any reasonable standard a failure, the inner leadership of the Republican Party felt so beholden to the first George Bush that it anointed his callow son and namesake almost upon the moment he won the governorship of Texas and, hand in glove with the big-money interests to which the Bushes have always cozied up, effectively closed the 2000 nominating process to anyone else.

The Bushes were fortunate, Phillips readily acknowledges, in having an interregnum presided over by Bill Clinton, who corrupted the presidency almost beyond imagination and thus made the public inordinately receptive to the fundamentalist moralizing in which George W. specializes. Phillips also acknowledges that the present Bush presidency may well be an illegitimate one, given the half-million-vote plurality won by Al Gore in 2000 and the exceedingly suspect Supreme Court ruling that put George W. in the White House. If this is indeed a dynasty -- or, perhaps more accurately, a family with dynastic pretensions -- then it certainly looks as much like an accidental one as like one created by public demand.

Any number of things could turn the "Bush dynasty" into yesterday's news -- continued frustration in Iraq and the much-ballyhooed "War on Terrorism," continued economic stagnation, increased popular resentment over the appalling chasm between the super-rich few and the struggling many, more evidence of corruption among the Bush family's business cronies, not to mention events and/or catastrophes as yet unseen -- and it is regrettable that Phillips does not confront this more directly. We don't have an appointive presidency, and we don't have a royal succession, at least not yet. The American people are not nearly so stupid as the Bushes and their retinue obviously believe them to be, and they haven't delivered their final verdict."

more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1649-2004Jan8.html