December 9, 2002
Bush's 'compassionate conservatism'
derailed by politics, DiIulio cautions
___By Mark Wingfield
___Managing Editor
___PHILADELPHIA--President Bush's desire to advance funding for faith-based initiatives has stalled in Washington because of "Mayberry Machiavellis" who are more concerned with politics than policy, according to the former director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.
___John DiIulio, who was appointed by Bush as the first head of the newly created office, served eight months, until August 2001. His assessment of how the Bush White House operates and what went wrong with the faith-based initiatives are reported in the January 2003 issue of Esquire magazine, in a story on Bush political adviser Karl Rove.
___DiIulio subsequently has apologized for the comments published in the Esquire story, but Esquire has posted on its website the entire text of a lengthy letter DiIulio wrote to Esquire reporter Ron Suskind Oct. 24.
___In that letter, DiIulio praises Bush as a "godly man and a moral leader" who is smarter than people give him credit for being and who is genuinely compassionate.
"There is a virtual absence as yet of any policy accomplishments that might, to a fair-minded non-partisan, count as the flesh on the bones ofso-called compassionate conservatism."
___--John DiIulio |
___The problem, DiIulio wrote, is that the White House is driven by political decisions made on the fly rather than policy decisions based on research and conviction.
___"There is a virtual absence as yet of any policy accomplishments that might, to a fair-minded non-partisan, count as the flesh on the bones of so-called compassionate conservatism," he wrote.
___In his eight months serving as an adviser to Bush, DiIulio said, "I heard many, many staff discussions but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions. There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues. There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy substance and analysis ... ."
___The result, he suggested, is "Mayberry Machiavellis--staff, senior and junior, who consistently talked and acted as if the height of political sophistication consisted in reducing every issue to its simplest black-and-white terms for public consumption, then steering legislative initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible."
___This atmosphere spelled death for the president's first faith-based initiative bill, said DiIulio, who teaches government and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
___The president's best interests would have been served by working with centrist Democrats in the Senate to extend the charitable choice bill signed by President Clinton in 1996, DiIulio argued.
___Instead, the White House "winked at the most far-right House Republicans who, in turn, drafted a so-called faith bill that (or so they thought) satisfied certain fundamentalist leaders and beltway libertarians but bore few marks of compassionate conservatism and was, as anybody could tell, an absolute political non-starter."
___Further, this tip to the right wing of the House Republicans did not reflect the president's own stated agenda or the research that had been done on what would be most effective for the nation's needs, DiIulio added.
___"The West Wing staff actually believed they could pass the flawed bill, get it through conference and get it to the president's desk to sign by the summer. Instead, the president got a political black eye when they could easily have handed him a big bipartisan political victory."
___Despite Bush's best intentions, the White House has a "virtually empty record on compassionate conservatism," DiIulio charged.
___That could change, he acknowledged, but only with "significant reforms to the policy-lite interpersonal and organizational dynamics of the place."
___The White House dismissed DiIulio's comments as "baseless and groundless." In a written apology, DiIulio agreed that his criticisms were "groundless and baseless due to poorly chosen words and examples."
___The complete text of DiIulio's letter may be found at www.esquire.com.
___
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