Kevin Phillips and George Soros, two very different political animals, have just written two very different books about the Bush presidency. Yet they come to the same conclusion. The sooner Mr Bush is out of the White House, the better for America and the world.

A former adviser to Richard Nixon, Mr Phillips was the Karl Rove - Mr Bush's consigliere - of his day. He devised the Republican party's "southern strategy" to woo traditional Democratic voters who had become disenchanted with their party's civil rights agenda under Lyndon Johnson.

As a result, the Republicans now have a solid southern base in any presidential election campaign, making it tough for any Democrat that can be tarred with the label of north-eastern Liberal - John Kerry, for example, as he comes from Massachusetts.

Despite his Republican pedigree, Mr Phillips has moved steadily to the left in the last 20 years, increasingly disillusioned by the concentration of wealth under Republican administrations. His latest book, American dynasty, is a demolition job on the Bush family. You can tell not only by the subtitle - How the Bush clan became the world's most powerful and dangerous family - but by the cover. It shows the two Bushes fishing from their motorboat, the epitomy of wealth and privilege.

Mr Phillips equates the second Bush presidency to some of the restoration regimes in Europe such as the Bourbons in France and finds it quite appalling that Americans are turning their backs on the republican - with a small r - traditions cherished by the founding fathers.

Tracing the family's ties over decades with high finance, oil interests, the military-industrial complex and the intelligence community, Mr Phillips concludes: "Four generations of building toward dynasty has infused the Bush family's hunger for power and practices of crony capitalism with a moral arrogance and backstage disregard of the democratic and republican traditions of the US government."

At times, Mr Phillips becomes overfond of unsubstantiated conspiracy theories. He devotes several pages to the question of whether the Reagan-Bush campaign negotiated with the Iranian government at the time of the hostage crisis to scupper Jimmy Carter's reelection chances in 1980, before admitting that he cannot make up his mind.

He is on firmer ground though in describing the close links between the Bushes and big business, such as Enron, the bankrupt energy firm, and Halliburton, the oil services firm, Dick Cheney, the vice-president, used to run, and now heavily involved in Iraq's reconstruction.

Enron poured money into the Bush campaign in 2000. After the election, the Enron chairman, Kenneth Lay, was named to the US energy department transition team. Ex-Enron men were also appointed to the commerce department. Now Enron's bosses are in disgrace, several of them charged with fraud, though not Mr Lay.

It is the Bush family's close ties with big business, the evangelical and fundamentalist south, overlaid with Mr Bush's insistence on ideological conservatism despite any national mandate that concerns Mr Phillips. The emergence of what he sees as a dynastic tradition in US politics also worries him.

Mr Phillips equates the second Bush presidency to restoration regimes in Europe, such as the Bourbons in France and is appalled that Americans are turning their backs on the republican traditions cherished by the founding fathers. Looking forward to the presidential vote in November, he writes: "The emergence of a dynastic tradition is contrary to the American political tradition, and the shorter the duration the better."

George Soros, one of the world's most successful financiers, is equally scathing about Mr Bush, accusing the president and his coterie of neo-cons of deliberately exploiting the trauma of September 11 to pursue policies that the American public would not otherwise have tolerated. The Bubble of American Supremacy focuses on the Bush doctrine of preemptive military action, which Mr Soros argues, has weakened, not strengthened the US.

"The government of the most powerful country on earth has fallen into the hands of extremists who are guided bya crude form of social Darwinism: life is a struggle for survival, and we must rely mainly on the use of force to survive. This is a distorted view. The survival of the fittest depends on cooperate as well as competition," he writes.

Mr Soros compares the desire to maintain American supremacy with a stock market bubble, when those buying shares lose touch with reality and prices climb to unsustainable levels, before crashing.

He argues that the ideologues in the Bush administration have similarly lost touch with the real world by taking an underlying reality - US preeminence - and pushing it to extremes.

"The distortion of reality became evident only when the election of President Bush brought into power a group of ideologues who believed in the pursuit of American supremacy by military means. That is when the pursuit of self-interest was carried too far," Mr Soros writes.

Guided by his boom-bust model, Mr Soros sticks his neck out and predicts that Mr Bush will be rejected by the voters in November. However, he acknowledges that he had to eat his words when he predicted the imminent collapse of the global capitalist system in 1997.

Whether Mr Bush is turfed out or now, what is striking about these two books is a deep sense of anger and alarm at the state of the US. Mr Phillips and Mr Soros can hardly be described as young hotheads, yet they feel sufficiently partisan to call for Mr Bush's political defeat. Mr Soros feels so strongly that he is prepared to spend about $15m (£7.9m) of his own money to help the American public to reject Mr Bush in November. John Kerry, are you listening?