Salon has an interesting
interview with Kevin Phillips, author of the old tome
The Emerging Republican Majority. Kevin Phillips has become deeply critical of both Bush regimes and has recently written a book about them called
American Dynasty. It is reviewed by Salon
here.
In the interview, the questioner wonders how the last two Bushes are so good at politics when they were so bad at business. Phillips answers:
See, I don't think they're even that good at politics. I think they got a terrific break in 1988: The Democrats picked Michael Dukakis, a Harvard dweeb type of Democrat. Then in 2000, they get Albert Gore. OK, he didn't really claim to invent the Internet, but here's this guy, the son of a senator, he certainly couldn't use the dynasty issue, he couldn't use any of that. So the Democrats have run people against the Bushes who've given the Bushes a fair pass on their issues.
By "dynasy issue," Phillips means the whole crony capitalism thing. So there you have it, from a long-time Republican-turned-Independent. The logical follow-on to this is that it seems that with Kerry voting against the war in 91 and for the most recent one, we're about to make this mistake again. As another poster so put it so well, the GOP need only say "if Kerry had been President, Saddam would still be in power, he'd have control of Kuwait, he'd be in charge of vast reserves of oil, blah blah blah." The war is turning bad for Bush, but Kerry will have a problem criticizing him over it. Thus the Bushes luck out again.
BTW, Phillips mentions Dean only once, saying Howard started to drop quickly because he lost his "connection." I guess by that he means that Howard went off-message.
Some other fascinating stuff in there where he claims the Bushes were involved in getting the Iranians to postpone the hostage release until after the election, so that it didn't help Carter.