A clear case of ‘misunderestimation’

American Dynasty
by Kevin Phillips
Penguin/Allen Lane, £18.99, pp. 397, ISBN 071399746X

The prosperous Floridan seaside resort of Sarasota should be natural Bush country. Home to golf courses, marinas and retirement condos, the town’s Republican Congress- woman Katherine Harris shot to fame in the 2000 presidential election as the official appointed by Governor Jeb Bush to make sure the Florida recount gave the right result. Last month, a friend of mine who is an astute observer of American politics was having lunch in a Sarasota shopping mall and saw something significant. A young man was selling ‘Help Beat Bush’ badges to passing shoppers — not just one or two but dozens of them. People were stopping and queuing to buy them, and then pinning them on. If you thought that the President was a dead cert to be re-elected this November, then think of the Sarasota shopping mall and think again.

It is not just the badges that are selling. Anti-Bush books top the bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic. Most are harmless, healthy satire. My brother gave me a desk diary that has a different Bushism for every day of the year. Others, like Michael Moore’s blockbusting Stupid White Men, claim to be serious critiques of the Bush presidency. They are not at all harmless, for they seem to have helped create a commonly held view, particularly in the UK and Europe, that the President is a moron and the Administration is run entirely by oil lobbyists, Enron executives and Zionists.

The latest in this vein is Bushwhacked, by Texan journalists Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose. Their claim is that George W. Bush is ‘congenitally incapable of checking the excesses of capitalism’. So we read of the New Jersey family being poisoned by a chemical insecticide plant because the Republican-run Environmental Protection Agency refuses to lift a finger.