Rise of a ruling-class family

Four examples are illustrative. One is the repeated use of family influence in arranging or smoothing over difficulties in the military service of three generations of Bushes: Prescott, George H.W. and George W. Similarly, the involvement of four Walker and Bush generations with finance -- in several cases, the investment side of the petroleum business -- helps to explain their recurrent preoccupation with investments, capital gains and tax shelters. George W. Bush's 2003 commitment to ending taxation of dividends was simply an extension of his father's frequent calls for reducing capital gains tax rates as the solution to any weakness in the national economy. Third, the family's ties to oil date back to Ohio steelmaker Samuel Bush's relationship to Standard Oil a century ago, while its ultimately dynastic connection to Enron spanned the first national Bush administration, the six years of George W. Bush's governorship of Texas, and the first year of his Washington incumbency. No other presidential family has made such prolonged efforts on behalf of a single corporation. Finally, there is no previous parallel to the relationships between the Bushes and the CIA and its predecessor organizations, which began in the invisible-ink and Ashenden, Secret Agent days of George Herbert Walker and Prescott Bush. Quite simply, analyzing separately the two Bush presidencies risks losing sight of such essential and revealing leitmotifs.

Arguably, a clan lacking such continuity of interests and relationships probably could not have succeeded in establishing a dynastic presidency. It would not have developed the requisite links to the establishment. It should be noted that the term "dynastic" is used here to describe a fact, not a theory: Namely, the succession of 2000, in which the eldest son of a defeated president was eight years later chosen by his father's party and inaugurated as the next president. Such inheritance has no American precedent; it trespasses, at least spiritually, on the governance framed by Washington, Franklin, Jefferson and Madison. Hereditary rulers were to be feared, the founders knew, even when, like the 15th century Medicis of Florence, they initially chose to keep the framework of the Republic in place.

While the election of 2000 became an obvious pivot by marking a full-fledged family restoration, the election of 1994 must be considered a secondary milestone, for it served to anoint formally eldest son George W. Bush, already the most logical choice to follow in his father's footsteps. Winning the Texas governorship that year established him as the family political heir over his younger brother, who lost a statehouse bid in Florida. Sharing his father's name, looking eerily like him, and having a similar electoral base in Texas, George W. was able to embody a much more resonant promise of "restoration" among voters than could have been managed by his younger brother Jeb. Also to the point, the 1994 elections suggested the motivational potential for a restoration: Namely, the moral anger of a large portion of the American electorate -- pollster Gallup came to call them "the repulsed" -- with the new president, Bill Clinton. Not a few voters felt apologetic, survey takers found, for having turned the elder Bush out of office in 1992.

Were history to posit a "Bush era," lasting from George H.W. Bush's triumph in 1988 through 2008, the two family presidencies might well define the entire two decades, turning the Clinton years into the political equivalent of sandwich filler. On the other hand, were Senator Hillary Clinton to achieve in 2008 a second restoration, this one Clintonian, public perception might well lurch toward some American equivalent of the 15th century Wars of the Roses, during which the English Crown was contested by the houses of York and Lancaster.

National politics, in short, has begun to take on the aura of a great family arena. Of the four wives of the major-party presidential nominees in 1996 and 2000, two quickly gained U.S. Senate seats: Hillary Clinton in 2000 and Elizabeth Dole in 2002. A third, Tipper Gore, decided not to make a Senate bid in Tennessee. Other seats in the U.S. Senate, in the meantime, began to pass more like membership in Britain's House of Lords. Regionally, the prime example of family continuity in national government has been New England. In Rhode Island, Republican Lincoln Chafee took the Senate seat of his father, John Chafee, when the latter died in 1999. Next door, Edward Kennedy occupies the Massachusetts Senate seat vacated by his brother when he became president, and just to the west in Connecticut, Senator Christopher Dodd sits where his father sat from 1958 to 1970. Parenthetically, both senators from New Hampshire are the sons of former governors. One of those from Maine is the wife of a former governor.

Dynasticism, then, is clearly not just a peculiarity of the Bush presidency. Yet there was a vital catalyst in the 1996-98 jelling among Republicans of a commitment, backstopped by favorable national polls, to running the Bush family's eldest heir for the presidency. It helped to legitimize a larger trend, broadening its momentum.

In this context, religion furnished another critical engine for a Bush triumph. To many Republicans and independents, the Bush family appeal was renewed in 1993-94 by ongoing revelations of Clinton's moral turpitude and his eventual impeachment. Perhaps because of how this tide of moral outrage had come to arouse Southern fundamentalist constituencies, George W. Bush began to emphasize and display unusual personal religiosity. He cast himself as the prodigal son, brought back to God after waywardness and crisis. From 1994 to 2000, he repeatedly used such biblically inflected language about good and evil that one could almost hear the words of Daniel and Jeremiah. So close did he draw to evangelical and fundamentalist Protestant leaders that in 2001, the Washington Post suggested that the new president had virtually replaced evangelist Pat Robertson as the leader of the U.S. religious right. To have suggested any similar role being assumed by his father would have been laughable.

In contrast to the sophisticated 1990s dialogue saluting globalization, Internet democracy and the supposed end of history, much of the world's population, especially its poor and dispossessed, was participating in a quite dissimilar expression -- a swell of fundamentalist and evangelical religion, often with a strong admixture of nationalism. While a few nations were actively seeking restorations and the resumption of power by kings, this larger trend, affecting Protestants, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists alike, dwelled instead on prophets and pharaohs, awaited or feared ones (red calves, Mahdis and Antichrists), holy cities and desecrating unbelievers, along with more ominous events like jihads, end times, raptures and ultimate Armageddon.

Next Page: The Bushes ascend from Wall Street and the Ivy League to Texas oil fields and the CIA

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