Nothing pleases liberal journalists more than the inevitable
defection of an “insider” from a conservative administration.
Remember David Stockman? After running Ronald Reagan’s economic
policies down in an interview with Atlantic Monthly, he
became the liberals’ battering ram against Reaganomics.
This year’s David Stockman award goes to John DiIulio, the
former head of George Bush’s Office of Faith-Based Initiatives. His
interview with Esquire magazine gives liberals a handy
weapon against George Bush’s “compassionate conservatism.” We can
now expect to hear the Eleanor Clifts of the press begin their
attacks, “As John DiIulio says …”
But how revealing are his remarks? A Democrat who voted for Al
Gore, DiIulio essentially criticizes the Bush administration for
not adopting his centrist Democratic mindset. He is upset that the
Bush White House doesn’t operate like the Brookings
Institution.
His letter to Esquire reporter Ron Suskind isn’t very
persuasive. He at once criticizes the Bush administration for being
too political — “the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis” — and
then criticizes it for not being more political. He complains that
it didn’t work with “centrist Senate Democrats” on the faith-based
initiatives bill, and that Bush staffers pushed “policy proposals
as far right as possible” and “winked at the most far-right House
Republicans.”
So, according to DiIulio, these “Mayberry Machiavellis” didn’t
compromise enough. One might think that phrase better fits the
Clinton administration. But DiIulio waxes nostalgic about the
Clinton administration. Clinton, he says, was a “leader with a
genuine interest in the policy process who encouraged
information-rich decision-making.” He was the
“policy-wonk-in-chief.” His staff “teemed with knowledgeable people
interested in making government work.”
For DiIulio, though he doesn’t state it, thinking within
Big-Government assumptions is “policy,” while thinking outside
those assumptions is mere ideology. Hence Republican presidents
like Ronald Reagan and George Bush can never be policy wonks
because they don’t agree with Big-Government policy. But what is so
disturbing about that?
What DiIulio views as ipso facto evidence of bad government —
“the administration has not done much, either in absolute terms or
in comparison to previous administrations at this stage, on
domestic policy” — is actually evidence of good government.
DiIulio’s implicit definition of domestic accomplishment is the
creation of new federal programs or the revision of old federal
programs that should never have been created in the first place. A
lack of “domestic accomplishments” simply means a president isn’t
expanding the size of the federal government. We can only hope that
Bush’s “thin record on domestic policy,” as DiIulio puts it,
remains that way. Reducing the size of the federal government is
the only real domestic accomplishment left to presidents conscious
of its original constitutional design.
But to “policy intellectuals,” philosophy is not policy. A
policy of removing bad policies just doesn’t count. Only continuing
them merits a president their approval.
Ron Suskind quotes an anonymous senior White House official as
saying, “The view of many people [in the White House] is that the
best government can do is simply do no harm, that it never is an
agent for positive change. If that’s your position, why bother to
understand what programs actually do?”
That’s the view inside the White House? Great. Such a cautious
view of the federal government suggests Bush staffers are far wiser
than the policy wonks who scoff at them. Bush staffers don’t
understand what federal programs do? No, it sounds like they
understand all too well what those programs do. If they see the
need to restrain the federal government, it is because they have
seen the failures of those programs.
DiIulio’s comments to Esquire are inadvertently
heartening. In his letter to Suskind, he suggests that the Mayberry
Machiavellis exist in part to “keep Bush ‘43’ from behaving like
Bush ‘41’ and moving too far to the center or inching at all
center-left.” He writes that their “fiction, supported by zero
empirical electoral evidence studies, is that ‘41’ lost in ‘92”
because he abandoned his right-wing base. “There are not ten House
districts in America where either the libertarian litany or the
right-wing religious policy creed would draw majority popular
approval, and, most studies suggest, Bush ‘43’ could have done
better versus Gore had he stayed more centrist, but, anyway, the
fiction is enshrined as fact.”
The Mayberry Machiavellis don’t sound too bad. Their “fictions”
should prove more solid than the “facts” of “policy
intellectuals.”
