Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

[SeriousMoney]

ml, when are you gonna do your homework? Phillips has seen both sides closeup and, fed-up with both, is now an independent.

Kevin Phillips first became known for his 1969 book, The Emerging Republican Majority, written in 1967 and 1968, and used by Richard Nixon in his successful 1968 presidential campaign. The Emerging Republican Majority predicted a new era of GOP control of the presidency based on the realignment of the South. Newsweek described it as “the political bible of the Nixon Administration.”

Educated at Colgate, the University of Edinburgh and Harvard Law School, Phillips, at age 27, had served as the chief elections and voting patterns analyst for the 1968 Nixon campaign. In 1969, he began twelve months tenure as Special Assistant to the U.S. Attorney General, but left in 1970 to become a syndicated newspaper columnist. In 1971, he became president of the American Political Research Corporation and editor-publisher of the American Political Report (through 1998). Discussions of the 1972 presidential election widely acknowledged how it had followed Phillips’s outlines, but then in 1973-74, the Watergate scandals confused the future.

After Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 restored the 1968-72 dynamics, Phillips was generally acknowledged as the Republican party’s principal electoral theoretician. In 1982, the Wall Street Journal described him as “the leading conservative electoral analyst -- the man who invented the Sun Belt, named the New Right, and prophesied ‘The Emerging Republican Majority’ in 1969.”

In 1978, Phillips became a radio commentator for CBS News, and in 1984, for National Public Radio as well. He served as a commentator for CBS Television News during the 1984, 1988, 1992 and 1996 election seasons and conventions.

Beginning with The Emerging Republican Majority in 1969, he has published a total of eleven books: Mediacracy: American Parties and Politics in the Communications Age (1974), Post-Conservative America (1982), Staying on Top: The Business Case for a National Industrial Strategy (1984), The Politics of Rich and Poor: Wealth and Electorate in the Reagan Aftermath (1990), Boiling Point: Democrats, Republicans and the Decline of Middle Class Prosperity (1993), Arrogant Capital: Washington, Wall Street and the Frustration of American Politics (1994), The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics and the Triumph of Anglo-America (1999), Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich (2002), William McKinley (2003) and American Dynasty: Aristocracy, Fortune and the Politics of Deceit in the House of Bush (January 2004).

In 1990, The Politics of Rich and Poor, a critique of Reagan-Bush economics, rose to number two on the New York Times bestseller list, aided by the fact of its endorsement (in book jacket blurbs) by former Republican president Nixon and New York Governor Mario Cuomo, at that time expected to be the 1992 Democratic presidential candidate. The book would later be described as a “founding document” of the 1992 presidential election campaigns of Clinton and other Democrats and independent Perot.

In reviewing his 1993 book, Boiling Point, the New York Times Book Review noted that “through more than 25 years of analysis and predictions, nobody has been as transcendentally right about the outlines of American political change as Kevin Phillips.” In 1990, Time observed that “in the shoot-from-the-hip world of Washington prognostication, Kevin Phillips stands out like Nostradamus.”

But in 1997, disgusted with how Washington politics had sunk to herald Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush, Phillips left the capital for his country house in Connecticut, and returned to his youthful focus on history. In 1999, The Cousins’ Wars, which analyzed the Anglo-American linkage and shared divisions through three civil wars -- the English Civil War, the American Revolution and the American Civil War -- was runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in History. In 2002, Wealth and Democracy, which warned about the historical perils posed by the increasingly warped inter-relationship of the two forces in the U.S., climbed to number 11 on the national (NYT) bestseller list.

In 2003, William McKinley, Phillips’s study of the (Republican) 25th U.S. president, done for Arthur Schlesinger’s American Presidents series, prompted the publication Foreign Affairs to say that “an unmatched ability to link retail politics with great public issues and broad economic trends gives Phillips extraordinary insight into the making of the American past. {He} is one of a handful of scholars who can treat both the American past and the American present with authority; this book will strengthen his already formidable reputation even more than it will help McKinley’s.”

Phillips, 63, now lives in Litchfield County, Connecticut, with his wife Martha. He is a commentator for NPR and the Los Angeles Times, and occasionally writes for Time and Harper’s. He did not support either George H.W. Bush in the 1988 and 1992 presidential elections or George W. Bush in 2000. In 2002, he re-registered in Connecticut as a political independent.

http://www.americandynasty.net/kp.htm