Few political analysts were more blistering about the Boy King before and during the 2004 election campaign than Kevin Phillips, the former Republican who identified and crafted the “Southern strategy” back in the late-’60s, which wasexploited by Nixon and Reagan and which is now largely responsible for the Boy King’s second coronation.
But Phillips, who is also the author of American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune, and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush, was just as harsh about John Kerry. “If Kerry wants to be stamped second-rate he can keep on being a stiff. He’ll join Dukakis and Gore,” Phillips told a stellar gathering of liberal Democrats last May. “But if Kerry loses, historians will have to put him in a category not invented yet.”
Are historians already out there working on that category? It’s a shame to have to ask.
