Why Kevin Phillips is wrong

Kevin Drum links to this Kevin Phillips op-ed from the L.A. Times on how even if Howard Dean doesn’t win, he could bring down George W. Bush with him. The key grafs:

The gutsy Dean seems to be emerging as the “anti-Bush” of 2003-04 U.S. politics. He’s pumping candor into a presidential race otherwise mired in Washington establishment-speak. This could be the key litmus test — for George W. Bush as well as Dean — because failing presidencies frequently attract such a nemesis, and the wounded incumbent often fails to survive. Three examples stand out. Independent Ross Perot became the “anti-Bush” who helped defeat the current president’s father in 1992. Newt Gingrich, who became House speaker in 1995, was the “anti-Clinton” who temporarily wounded the incumbent in 1994. The most relevant example may be Eugene McCarthy, the tweedy, intellectual U.S. senator from Minnesota who became the “anti-LBJ” of 1968, forcing an earlier deceitful, cowboy- hatted Texas war president, Lyndon B. Johnson, into retirement. None of the three ever became president, but two of the three, Perot and McCarthy, raised issues and criticisms that helped defeat a president. Dean could follow suit.

Looking at those cases again, I draw a different lesson — a president is doomed when the attacks come from the base. In Phillips’ “most relevant example” McCarthy attacked LBJ, a liberal Democrat, from the left. The Perot example is misleading — far more damaging to Bush was Pat Buchanan’s primary challenge, which weakened Bush enough to give Buchanan a coveted prime-time slot at the Republican National Convention, which wound up looking like a bad Leni Riefenstahl film. Gingrich’s attacks on Clinton — as I’ve said before — actually sowed the seeds for Clinton’s re-election in 1996. Gingrich overreached in believing that the 1995 government shutdown would help Republicans — instead, Clinton looked like the responsible, sane choice. George W. Bush will probably not be attacked from the right in 2004 (though see this Matt Bai article in yesterday’s NYT Magazine suggesting otherwise). Phillips acknowledges this, but thinks this is a weakness for Bush:

The younger Bush’s vulnerability for pandering to the religious right is a lot different — bigger, but tougher to nail — than his father’s. In 1992, as the elder Bush’s job approval and election prospects plummeted, he had to openly flatter the party’s preachers, paying a price with suburban swing voters. President Bush hasn’t had to do that since early 2000, when he needed Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and the Bob Jones University crowd to save his bacon against John McCain in the South Carolina GOP primary. What the younger Bush has done instead is to give the religious right so much patronage and critical policy influence — to say nothing of coded biblical references in key speeches — as to have built them into the system. The degree is little less than stunning. In late 2001, religious right leaders sampled by the press said Bush had replaced Robertson as the leader of the religious right, becoming the first president to hold both positions simultaneously. Next year’s Democratic nominee could win if he or she is shrewd enough to force the president to spend the autumn of 2004 in the Philadelphia, Detroit and Chicago suburbs defending his stance on creationism, his ties to flaky preachers and the faith healer he’s appointed to an advisory board for the Food and Drug Administration.

Is Phillips correct? It’s possible, but bear in mind that he’s basically echoing the Judis & Teixeira argument in The Emerging Democratic Majority, and not even Judis thinks this argument will hold in 2004! One other thing: all Bush would have to do is go to Philadelphia, since Bush lost all three of the states, and would only need to win one of them for a comfortable margin of victory. And, given the reasons for Rick Santorum’s popularity in Pennsylvania, if I were Karl Rove that’s the state I’d want to cherry-pick. Kevin Phillips has been right before. He came to prominence with the prescient The Emerging Republican Majority. Bear in mind, however, that his follow-up book, The Politics of Rich and Poor argued that the way to win the 1992 election was by pushing class issues. Bill Clinton won the election by sagely ignoring Phillips’ advice. Not surprisingly, this book can be purchased at Amazon for a whopping thirteen cents.