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The miscreant dynasty
The Bush generations have enriched themselves while impoverishing
the presidency.
By Howell Raines
12/19/05 "The
Age" -- -- AT THIS point, the policy legacy of George
Bush seems pretty well defined by three disparate disasters: Iraq in
foreign affairs, Katrina in social welfare, corporate influence over
tax, budget and regulatory decisions. As a short-term political
consequence, we may avoid another dim-witted Bush in the White
House. But what the Bush dynasty has done to presidential campaign
science — the protocols by which Americans elect presidents in the
modern era — amounts to a political legacy that can haunt the
Republic for years to come.
We are now enduring the third generation of Bushes who have taken
the playbook of the "ruthless" Kennedys and amplified it into a
consistent code of amorality in both campaign tactics and
governance. In their campaigns, the Kennedys used money,
image-manipulation, old-boy networks and, when necessary, personal
attacks on worthy adversaries such as Adlai Stevenson and Hubert
Humphrey. But there was also a solid foundation of knowledge and
purpose undergirding John Kennedy's sophisticated internationalism,
his Medicare initiative, his late-blooming devotion to racial
justice, and Robert Kennedy's opposition to corporate and union
gangsterism. Like Truman, Roosevelt and, yes, even Lincoln, two
generations of Kennedys believed that a certain amount of political
chicanery was tolerable in the service of altruism.
Behind George W, there are four generations of Bushes and Walkers
devoted first to using political networks to pile up and protect
personal fortunes and, latterly, to using absolutely any means to
gain office, not because they want to do good, but because they are
what passes in American for hereditary aristocrats. In sum, George
Bush stands at the apex of a pyramid of privilege whose history and
social significance that, given his animosity to scholarly thought,
he almost certainly does not understand.
Here's the big picture, as drawn most effectively by the Republican
political analyst Kevin Phillips in American Dynasty. Starting in
1850, the Bushes through alliance with the smarter Walker clan,
built up a fortune based on classic robber-baron foundations:
railways, steel, oil, investment banking, armaments and materiel in
the world wars. They had ties to the richest families of the
industrial age: Rockefeller, Harriman, Brookings. Yet they never
adopted the charitable, public-service ethic that developed in those
families.
Starting with Senator Prescott Bush's alliance with president
Eisenhower and continuing through the dogged loyalty of his son,
George H. W. Bush, to two more gifted politicians, presidents Nixon
and Reagan, the family has developed a prime rule of advancement. In
a campaign, any accommodation, no matter how unprincipled, any
attack on an opponent, no matter how false, was to be embraced if it
worked.
The paradigm in its purest form was seen when the first president
Bush, in 1980, renounced a lifelong belief in abortion rights to run
as Reagan's vice-president. To this day, any mention of this
sell-out of principle sends the elder Bush into a rage. His son
surpassed the father's dabbling with pork rinds and country music.
He adopted the full agenda of redneck America — on abortion, gun
control, Jesus — as a matter of convenience and, most frighteningly,
as a matter of belief. Before the Bushes, American political slogans
of the left and right embodied at least a grain of truth about how a
presidential candidate would govern. The elder Bush's promise of a
"kinder, gentler" America and the younger's "compassionate
conservatism" brought us the political slogan as pure
disinformation. They were asserting a claim of noblesse oblige
totally foreign to their family history.
But whether Bush the father was pandering or Bush the son was
praying, the underlying political trade-off was the same. The Bushes
believe in letting the hoi polloi control the social and religious
restrictions flowing from Washington, so long as Wall Street gets to
say what happens to the nation's money. The Republican Party as a
national institution has endorsed this trade-off. What we don't know
yet is whether a GOP without a Bush at the top is seedy enough to
keep it going. Dating back to the days when they talked of making
George Washington a king, Americans have had an ambivalent attitude
towards their aristocrats. They have also believed that dirty
politics originated with populist Machiavellis such as Louisiana
Governor Huey Long and urban bosses such as Chicago mayor Richard
Daley. The Bushes, with their minders such as Rove, Cheney and DeLay,
have turned that historic expectation upside down. Now political
deviance trickles down relentlessly from the top. The next
presidential election will be a national test of whether the taint
of Bushian tactics outlasts what is probably the last Bush family
member to occupy the executive mansion.
In 1988, the first president Bush secured office by falsely
depicting his opponent as a coddler of rapists and murderers. In
2000, the present president Bush nailed down the nomination by
accusing John McCain of opposing breast-cancer research. He won in
2004 with a barrage of lies about John Kerry's war record.
With the right leadership — the kind of flawed, but principled
presidents sprinkled through its history — the United States can
stop the blood-letting in Iraq, regain its standing in the world,
avert the crises in health care and Social Security, and even bring
disaster relief to the Gulf Coast.
But that's not simply a matter of keeping Bushes and Bushites, with
their impaired civic consciences, out of the White House. The next
presidential campaign will show us whether these miscreant
patricians have poisoned the well of the presidential campaign
system. If so, there's no telling what kind of president we might
get.
Howell Raines is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of
The New York Times.
Copyright © 2005. The Age Company Ltd.
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