Again pulling back the curtain on the policies of the George W. Bush Administration, Phillips maintains that the "implicit model followed during both Bush presidencies" was "investment-driven [emphasis in original]." Thus the tax cuts for businesses and the wealthy, the cut in the capital gains tax, low interest rates (the Fed, as other writers have demonstrated, is not as independent as legend would have it) and high levels of federal debt (acceptable, Phillips argues, if accompanied by investment in the United States). Though Phillips doesn't mention them, this investment orientation would also apply to Bush's proposals to privatize Social Security and his countenancing of the drying up of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds. It has been commonly thought that the purpose of these policies was simply to shrink the size of the federal government--which was succeeding until Bush, recently and to the outrage of his allies on the right, initiated some re-election-driven spending. He and his political henchman, Karl Rove, stop at little to win. George W. Bush's ruthlessness has been masked by his ostensible amiability. But that's yet another trick pulled on the American public.

As Phillips points out, the son takes after his father in this respect as well. The seemingly nice, humane George H.W. Bush allowed some fairly brutal political tactics--such as the infamous Willie Horton ad against Michael Dukakis, which played upon racist fears of black men and suggested that the hapless but decent Dukakis was soft on crime. The father had his "kinder and gentler" government and the son has "compassionate conservatism"--both of which have proved to be phony.

And both men (as well as Barbara Bush) are world-class resenters. They manage to hold grudges for years. Father, mother and son reportedly continue to resent James Baker for resisting (understandably) for a while Bush père's plea that he give up his job as Secretary of State in order to run George H.W. Bush's race for re-election in 1992. That George W. has called on Baker for a couple of odd jobs signaled that he felt them to be crises. Bush the son and Rove also continue to resent--"hate" isn't too strong a word--John McCain for running against Bush in 2000 and remaining independent of him after that.

On foreign policy, on the other hand, father and son differ greatly on the importance of allies and of the United Nations (where George H.W. Bush once served as ambassador), and this is reliably said to distress Bush the father. Though the son has tried to repair relations with some European leaders--albeit not the French--and some European leaders have, because of their need for US economic and military strength, reciprocated, the damage was severe. And both father and son, of course, wanted to eliminate Saddam Hussein. The son memorably said, "This is a guy that tried to kill my dad." Though before, during and after the second Iraq war many people dismissed as delusionary the argument of numerous opponents, in the United States and abroad, that the effort to overthrow Saddam was, like the first Gulf War, about oil, Phillips makes a strong case that it was among the leading reasons for going to war.

Father and son have also disagreed on how to deal with Saudi Arabia. The father treated it as a place where he could do business (this is still the case, through his involvement with the Carlyle Group, a somewhat mysterious investment company in Washington), and he had close ties to leading members of the Saudi royal family. The son sees the Saudi government as out of touch and ripe for an overthrow. This may be in part a matter of the relative historical contexts of the two men's presidencies, and also their generational differences. But it's also a sign of the influence--or perhaps reinforcement--on the son by a small nucleus of neoconservatives in the Pentagon as well as of his more radical temperament.

As Phillips puts it, many observers mistakenly think that George W. Bush's policies are simply "the product of upper-class bias." In fact, George W. Bush is more radical than Ronald Reagan, and compared with George W., Richard Nixon, Phillips's original mentor, was a far-out liberal. Nixon's domestic policies were indeed moderate for his times; only Nelson Rockefeller and his lonely band of soulmates stood to Nixon's left. And now Phillips is on Nixon's left--and George W. Bush is far to his right.

So Kevin Phillips's personal journey resembles America's political journey--from the moderate Nixon to the radical George W. Bush, though at least half the country would disagree with, on the one hand, his earlier affection for Nixon or, on the other, his current populism. That Phillips has ventured where others--a very few others--have taken only a small step, or not even put a foot forward, is a great credit to him, and a commentary on the rest of us.

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