"I couldn't stand to support this dynasty of deceit"

You really zero in on the alleged October surprise of 1980. I think you make a good point in saying that nobody will ever prove that Bush himself went to Paris in the summer of 1980, but clearly there were negotiations between the Reagan-Bush camp and the Iranians.

Clearly, and there were very credible witnesses to it. But the credibility emerged after Bush was defeated in 1992, very lopsidedly. He got the weakest share of the votes, for an incumbent, since 1912. He was history, so it didn't seem worth paying attention to. That's why it's so unbelievable to me there hasn't been a willingness to look at the continuity between father and son -- the same name, the same supporters and the same preoccupation with the people at the top. The same preoccupation with the Middle East, with Iraq. This is Bush II in a very literal sense, but they're not making the connection.

Do you see the book helping people make that connection?

Let's put it this way: The book got a very favorable review on the front page of the Washington Post Book World. On Sunday, it got a good review, considering the circumstances, from the New York Times.

Considering the circumstances? What circumstances?

It's the New York Times. It's the national paper of record, really. They want to preserve a caveat there. They don't want to say, "This book is it." They give it a very nice review, they push it forward, but they express reservations. That is the national newspaper -- you can buy it, and people do, in San Francisco. It's the national newspaper of record. They have to be more cautious.

Michael Oreskes, who reviewed the book for the Times, raised an odd objection -- that you didn't reveal the origins of your "dislike" for the Bushes. It made me want to ask you that question: What is the nature of your dealings with the Bushes? Is there a personal basis for that dislike?

It's really very simple. "The Emerging Republican Majority" was about the idea of Middle America taking back the country, a kind of semi-populist conservatism. It produced "Joe Sixpack" and terms like that. It never suggested that we wanted a new elite. It was an anti-elite idea, the idea that the liberal elite had been empowered for too long, and had failed on many fronts. Generally in history when you see this kind of cyclical change you have outsiders coming in, in this case from the South and the West. It was a repudiation of the old Republican elites, who'd lost touch with everything, as well as the liberal elites. So the whole idea of this family that couldn't win elections -- George Bush lost twice running for the Senate from Texas, but he succeeded thanks to these connections -- well, that was anathema to me. In 1990, when I wrote "The Politics of Rich and Poor," which was an indictment of Reaganomics but especially Bush and his cotillion set, Richard Nixon gave me the lead quote on the back of the book jacket! I mean, you can say what you want about Richard Nixon, and people say a lot, but he wasn't somebody who went into politics for the elites.

So there's no personal reason for your enmity.

No, we've had hardly any interaction at all. It's legitimate to ask that, but the bulk of my reaction to the Bushes has really been that they represented an elite type of Republicanism that was hostile to my whole Middle American thesis about the party. I represented the part of the Republican Party that thought he was born with a silver foot in his mouth and never should have gotten into the White House. And, as far as I know, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan shared that opinion.

I've always wanted to ask you this: "The Emerging Republican Majority" was about more than race, but clearly racial politics was one of the things that contributed to the Republican majority that's still with us. But what could the Democrats have done differently in handling the race question? I think you'd agree that history shows the Democrats were on the right side of the issue -- and yet it haunts them to this day. Was there anything they could have done to mitigate the impact? I think of Lyndon Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act and saying, "I just handed the South to the Republicans."

I don't think that the Democrats could have done anything, really. But what happened was that they misfired on three crucial issues: They misfired on the way they handled the war issue, they misfired on socioeconomic issues, they misfired on the cultural issues. You can't misfire on all three fronts. But you know, right now, the conservatives are coming close to misfiring in the same way. They're botching the economy, they're botching Iraq, they may have botched 9/11, and they've got the religious right running loose, so they're going to botch culture. And when you get to that point, the motion of your elites -- the forward motion of your interest groups inside the Republican Party -- gets very hard to turn around.

So you feel them moving inexorably toward disaster?

They get carried away with hubris. That was the problem for the Democrats with Johnson. After the Kennedy assassination and the Goldwater defeat [in 1964], they got so carried away they went into hubris. But, you see, the Democrats don't use any of this very well. They have very little institutional memory. Why don't they use the fact that it was Bush's father who participated in building up Saddam Hussein? They aren't good at framing any of these things. When the maneuvering towards war was beginning, there was none of this framing: Why was Saddam still there? The president's father spent six or seven years building him up. The Democrats don't have much going for them at all. You have a Michael Dukakis, then an Al Gore, who just really wasn't much of a fighter in 2000.

Your reading of the Florida recount period was chilling, especially Gore's failure to fight there. It really brought it all back for me.

That's right, you had that fellow who wrote a good book ...

Jake Tapper.

Yeah, it was really very good.

And we broke the voter-roll cleansing story you cited ...

That's right. So you know.

You think if the newspaper consortium that recounted the votes hadn't squelched their findings in the wake of 9/11, there might have been more of a public outcry. I guess I'm not so sure.

Oh, there would have been. Since you followed the story, you know the importance of the overvotes. What you had with the overvotes was something in the neighborhood of 160,000 to 175,000, and most surveys said you could really retrieve 25 percent of them very clearly.

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