Journalist Ron Suskind is one-stop shopping for Bush
administration castaways. But what if John DiIulio — Suskind gave
him a platform in Esquire magazine in 2002 to call the
administration “the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis” — and Paul
O’Neill had been shopping a conservative critique of Bush? Would
Suskind have cracked open his notebook?
Not likely. Few events excite liberal journalists more than the
inevitable defection of an “insider” from a Republican
administration, provided that the defector is a liberal who is
telling the media what it wants to hear. What interests the
Suskinds are not conservative defectors but David Stockman
clones.(Stockman, after ridiculing Ronald Reagan’s economic
policies in an interview with Atlantic Monthly, became the
media’s battering ram against Reaganomics.)
If the defector agrees with the liberal critique of the
Republican administration, his dissent is profoundly important to
the media. If he doesn’t, well, it is not so important. Imagine if
O’Neill’s criticism of Bush was that he is a big spender. Or that
he didn’t cut taxes sharply enough. Or that his Medicare
entitlement and education bills resembled Democratic bills.
<60 Minutes’s cameras don’t roll for criticism of that
nature.
Of course the effectiveness of the dissent requires that the
dissenter appear a loyal Republican, so the media can say, “As
Republican so-and-so says, this Republican administration is
dumb/dishonest…” Hence journalist Joe Klein and others are
trying to dress up this year’s David Stockman as a traditional
Republican deeply, and very thoughtfully, troubled by Bush’s
supposed radical policies. Klein, appearing on CNN on Monday night
with a suddenly adrenaline-pumping Paula Zahn, saw vast
significance in O’Neill’s dissent, because O’Neill is “ground zero”
of “traditional Republicanism.”(On another network, a writer from
Harper’s was extolling O’Neill’s thoughtful Taft
Republicanism.) O’Neill is a traditional Republican? That’s news to
traditional Republicans. They considered him a highly unwise choice
for Treasury secretary, given his bald opposition to tax cuts and
badmouthing of supply-side economics long before he was
nominated.
O’Neill came into the administration disagreeing with it. That
he left in the same state is hardly news. What’s surprising is that
Republican administrations never seem to learn the lesson: if you
bring liberals, with a D. or R. after their names, into your
administration, they will burn you. And even if they don’t leave
the administration in a high-profile pout, they will leak to the
press like crazy.(Which of course is an indisputable good in the
media’s mind: if a liberal Republican leaks to the press, that’s
public spirited; but if a Republican leaks, say, that Joseph
Wilson’s wife is manipulating her position at the CIA, that’s a
malicious abuse of power.)
O’Neill’s criticism of Bush amounts to saying that Bush didn’t
agree with him. So what? Had Bush agreed with O’Neill, would that
then mean he is a very engaged president? Suskind’s interviews with
O’Neill sound just like his interviews with DiIulio (who at least
had the decency to acknowledge that talking to Suskind was a
graceless mistake on his part.)
A Democrat and Brookings fellow who voted for Al Gore, DiIulio
had said to Suskind that the Bush administration was too political
— “the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis” — and not political
enough — he complained that it didn’t work with “centrist Senate
Democrats” and that Bush staffers had pushed “policy proposals as
far right as possible” and “winked at the most far-right House
Republicans.” All the criticism basically meant was that Bush
hadn’t adopted DiIulio’s centrist Democratic mindset and that the
Bush White House didn’t function like the Brookings
Institution.
And then there were DiIulio’s nostalgic musings on the Clinton
administration. Clinton, he told Suskind, 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.”
Agree with O’Neill and DiIulio, and you are an engaged policy
wonk. Disagree with them and you are an out-of-touch ideologue.
DiIulio’s comments to Suskind were unintentionally reassuring.
He said 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.”
Sounds good.
DiIulio said that their “fiction, supported by zero empirical
electoral evidence studies, is that ‘41’ lost in ‘92” because he
alienated 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,” said DiIulio.
‘41’ did lose because he alienated his right-wing base. Didn’t
O’Neill and DiIulio know that they were working not for the father
but for the son?
