White House driven by politics, says DiIulio

Christian Century, Dec 18, 2002

According to President Bush's former "faith czar," the White House's desire to advance faith-based welfare stalled in Congress because of "Mayberry Machiavellis" in the administration who are more concerned with politics than policy.

John DiIulio also said Bush allowed the White House to be driven by politics rather than "compassionate conservatism," but DiIulio has since retracted his comments. Some Bush critics are unconvinced by the retraction, and DiIulio's comments have created a firestorm inside the Washington Beltway.

DiIulio was appointed by Bush as the first head of the new White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives but served only eight months, resigning in August 2001. He was responsible for spearheading legislation that would have expanded the government's ability to provide direct grants for social services to overtly religious charities. That legislation still has not passed.

DiIulio's assessment of how the Bush White House operates and what went wrong with the legislation is reported in the January 2003 issue of Esquire, in a story on Bush political adviser Karl Rove.

After the story broke, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer lambasted the article as "groundless and baseless." DiIulio then quickly offered an apology and called his comments in the magazine "groundless and baseless due to poorly chosen words and examples."

However, as several commentators have pointed out, DiIulio has not offered any retraction of specific facts in his comments. Esquire later posted on its Web site the entire text of a lengthy letter DiIulio wrote to reporter Ron Suskind October 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. The problem, DiIulio wrote, is that the White House is driven by political decisions designed to rally popular support, rather than policy decisions based on research and conviction.

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, was "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 in Philadelphia.

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.--ABP