The Bush dynasty's dark magic

"American Dynasty" makes you realize, if you hadn't already, why Bush is the ideal Christian-right president. He fits the Fundamentalist Project's criteria for the type of person who's attracted to this rigid brand of Christianity: He was a rootless (albeit wealthy) ne'er-do-well who couldn't quite find his way in business, fought a drinking problem and then turned his life around, with the help of Billy Graham, when he adopted a fundamentalist approach to Christianity. He was almost literally saved by Jesus, and where fundamentalists and Southerners never trusted his father, they embrace George W. as one of them. He repays them with coded biblical imagery in his speeches, from his constant references to "evil" to his public reliance on the power of prayer, plus a Middle East policy that seems tailor-made to Christian right "end times" dogma.

Both Christian fundamentalists and ultra-Zionists believe Israel is meant to inhabit the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria -- the Christians because that will supposedly trigger Armageddon, the battle between Christ and the Antichrist. Phillips gets up to his elbows in creepy "end times" activism -- Christian Southerners funding Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories, Texas cattlemen breeding the mythic "red heifer," whose appearance is supposed to signal Israelis to rebuild the old temple in Jerusalem and usher in Armageddon. He also cites polls showing that fully 45 percent of American Christians see the world ending with an apocalyptic battle. You start to wonder if somehow Bush really was destined to play this role -- and if there's a safe place anywhere on earth to sit out the cataclysm that, between his religion and his foreign policy, he seems capable of provoking.

Occasionally Phillips slides partway down the slippery slope of conspiracy theory. He wades into the most sordid -- and mostly unproven -- allegations against the Bush dynasty: that Prescott Bush actively propped up Hitler through his businesses, even during the war; that Yale's secret Skull and Bones society was central to the Bay of Pigs scandal, and that George H.W. Bush was a CIA asset working with anti-Castro Cubans back then; that in 1980, he personally flew to Paris to lobby Iranian leaders and make sure the American hostages weren't returned before the November election; that a young George W. Bush was arrested on cocaine charges and his father had his record expunged, and that he went AWOL during his National Guard service. He throws water on some but not all of those theories, but lets most stand as possibilities. (It's true that Prescott Bush owned a small interest in a New York bank that helped finance the Nazis, and which was seized by the U.S. government in 1942. Other allegations of Nazi links remain unsubstantiated.)

He quotes, respectfully, the best-known conspiracy theorists on each issue: Ron Rosenbaum on Skull and Bones, Robert Parry on Bush's personal involvement in the October surprise, and, far more dubiously, the late J.H. Hatfield, author of "Fortunate Son," which peddled the notion that Bush was busted for cocaine in the 1970s but his father got his record expunged. Rosenbaum and Parry might be wrong, but their work is respected; Hatfield's allegations (looked into by Salon, among other publications) probably shouldn't be quoted in a serious book except to debunk them.

But Phillips' retelling of how Bush won the presidency in 2000 is exhaustive, authoritative and disturbing. In some ways it's oddly soothing, in this politically polarized terrain, to see a once-loyal Republican (Phillips has registered as an Independent in reaction to the Bush takeover of the GOP) assemble the evidence that's mostly been confined to liberal magazines and Web logs that Bush wrongly seized the presidency by playing aggressive politics during the Florida recount, and finally, by appealing to his father's friends on the Supreme Court. Phillips goes everywhere -- the bourgeois riot in Miami, when thuggish conservatives stopped that county's recount; elderly Jews who supposedly voted for Pat Buchanan in Palm Beach, thanks to the butterfly ballot; irregularities in Broward and Volusia counties -- and shows how Gore essentially lost when he didn't demand a statewide recount that would also have looked at the issue of "overvotes," ballots where more than one candidate was inadvertently selected, but the voter's intended choice was clear. (And he rails against the media outlets that sponsored their own recount for choosing to mute their findings -- which were that, using every conceivable recount standard, Gore won Florida -- in an outburst of patriotic restraint after 9/11.)

It's the scandal of Florida that gives credibility to Phillips' sometimes paranoid-seeming claims that the Bushes are a "dynasty." Of course, it's not a literal dynasty: President Bush did not inherit the office from his father. But when I pointed that out to Phillips, trying to argue that, like him or not, Bush had "obviously" been elected, the author laughed. "Obviously? I'm not so sure about that." And he had me. Bush's lingering lack of legitimacy, post-Florida, is part of what has polarized the nation, encouraging the paranoid to weave conspiracy theories about a shadow government -- and even sober liberals to wonder if it's possible to defeat the potent combination of money, fear and religious fervor the Bushes have marshaled, especially post-9/11, to continue their control of the White House.

Given how much ink has been spilled lately about "Bush hate," which supposedly afflicts only crazy lefties and their Democratic Party panderers like Screamin' Howard Dean and the reinvented Angry Al Gore, it's fascinating to see a conservative who despises Bush. Phillips admits his dislike for both George Bushes in the book, and in a mostly respectful New York Times review, Michael Oreskes suggested the author should have revealed the personal basis for that dislike. Phillips insists there isn't one, and I believe him. Of course the GOP strategist who preached a conservative populism, a rejection of both Democratic and Republican elites, would be appalled by the rise of Bush Republicanism, a winner-take-all social Darwinism imposed by a mediocre family that rigged the rules of the game to benefit itself. You can tell Phillips particularly loathed the first President Bush, with his Ivy League affect and his pork-rind pretenses; but he's not much higher on the allegedly more down-to-earth son, refusing even to grant the authenticity of his roots: Midland, Texas, as Phillips notes, was overtaken by Easterners during the oil boom of the 1950s and '60s, and its streets were named after Ivy League schools.

Phillips believes that a Democrat who can channel populist disgust at the corrupt, patrician Bushes has a chance of toppling George W. Bush this year. And while his chapter on the power of the Christian right is alarming, it also contains what Phillips says are the seeds of hope for Democrats. Because just as he thinks Democrats bungled the '60s by embracing the counterculture without reassuring the anxious white ethnics who were their base, Phillips now believes the Republicans are bungling by embracing Christian right extremists who are going to lose the culture wars for the GOP.

"American Dynasty" made it to No. 5 on the New York Times bestseller list last weekend, which can't be good news for the Bush campaign. On the other hand, I find myself wondering if the book is being bought and read by conservatives, or only by Bush-weary Democrats. It's well known that the country's Red vs. Blue polarization is reflected on bestseller lists, where Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly shriek at Al Franken and Michael Moore, but almost nobody reads from both sides of the aisle. Here's hoping some Republicans do reach past Coulter's invective and pick up Phillips' passionate call to arms. If they'd take their party back, we'd be closer to getting our country back. Howard Dean, less angry, might get his voice back, and the Bushes might have to settle for being wealthy folk who just can't win a national election, no matter how much they try to rig the rules.

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