Kevin Phillips is famed as the man who coined the term "Sun Belt." Almost four decades ago, Phillips predicted that the residents of that part of the country would form the core of what he termed "the emerging Republican majority" in a book with that title.
But he's not happy with the re sults. Phillips is one of a gr owing number of conservatives who are disgusted with the way George W. Bush has squandered the legacy of Ronald Reagan. I spoke to him about his new Bush-bashing book "American Theocracy" just before I left for a week's vacation in North Carolina.
My timing couldn't have been better. The book's thesis is that Bush has turned the GOP over to a bunch of half-wits and holy rollers who are eagerly awaiting Armageddon. To these people, the idea of using nuclear weapons in the Mideast makes perfect sense, he told me.
"The reason people might be willing to nuke Iran is because everything is leading to a second coming anyway," said Phillips.
Republicans in the Northeast may view the end of the world as less than desirable, but the true believers of the Sun Belt see things differently, Phillips told me. When I got south of D.C. on Interstate 95, I began to realize just how differently. On the way down, I'd been listening to a C-SPAN radio station that carried political talk shows as well as presentations on a number of other interesting topics.
I put a CD on for a while. Then somewhere south of Richmond, I went back to scanning the radio dial. Before long, I came upon a discussion of entomology. I figured it was the C-SPAN station again. I listened attentively as the speaker discussed in some detail various types of insects. He seemed to know an awful lot about them. Until he got to the punch line:
"Now, some people think that all of these bugs are descended from a common ancestor long ago," he said. "But of course God made each one of these bugs individually just the way they are today."
This all happened not millions of years ago but just the other day, scientifically speaking. It turned out the bug expert was a professor at Bob Jones University in South Carolina, an outpost of new-Earth creationism. That's the Sun Belt for you. A guy who would barely qualify as a village idiot here in Jersey can teach at some Southern schools.
I was witnessing first hand the essence of Phillips' critique of the Bush era: If you're dumb enough to believe the world was created 6,000 years ago, then you're dumb enough to believe the Bush presidency is going well.
"American Theocracy" offers a detailed and depressing analysis of where the GOP went wrong. Under Bush, Phillips writes, the United States became more and more dependent on expensive foreign oil. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy be came based more and more on borrowing. In the book, Phillips predicted that if the price of oil hit $70 a barrel by 2010, the dollar could crash.
That prediction may come true ahead of schedule. By last week, oil had hit $75. All over the South, people were moaning about the cost of filling up those immense pickups and SUVs they drive for no good reason.
Phillips attributes the runup in oil prices to Bush's bungling in Iraq. The original plan for Iraq, he writes, was for a quick war that would have the effect of "flooding the world with cheap Iraqi production, breaking the back of OPEC, installing ExxonMobil in the rich Majnoon fields, and living happily ever after on twenty-dollar to thirty-dollar oil for America's SUVs and McMansions."
Instead, Bush's failure to plan for the post-invasion period led to ever-higher oil prices. "No U.S. military commitment," he writes, "has so utterly failed in its unspoken objectives."
Phillips told me that Bush deceived the American people on the reason for the Iraq invasion.
"He made a comment that it has nothing to do with oil," Phillips said. "It's hard to avoid concluding that was a lie."
When it comes to oil, Phillips is no fan of the first President Bush either. But unlike his dad, the current President Bush has the added disadvantage of being both in competent and ignorant.
"He's not a deep student of history, and we're paying the price," said Phillips.
There's one table in the back of the book that should be of particular interest to Republicans in New Jersey. Of all the states now known as the "blue" states, New Jersey was the only one to have supported Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan by majorities exceeding 60 percent.
If there was a point at which the GOP lost Jersey, I suspect it was in the 2000 presidential primary. In a last-ditch effort to stave off John McCain, Bush made a visit to the aforementioned Bob Jones University in South Carolina. That university is not just a center for new-Earth creationism but also a center of anti-Catholic sentiment, among other idiocies. No candidate who possessed the qualifications to be the Republican nominee for president could ever have set foot in such a place. To this date, no one has.
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