WASHINGTON -- A former Bush administration aide has apologized for committing a Washington sin: lapsing into candor in the presence of a reporter.
Candor is what comes out when you tell the truth without spin or embellishment. Too much of it can get you into trouble in the world of politics.
John J. DiIulio Jr. resigned in August 2001 after about eight months as head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, aimed at giving federal money to religious charities. In retrospect, he now sounds shocked, shocked to discover politics at work in the Bush White House -- at the expense of good public policy.
"What you've got is everything, and I mean everything, being run by the political arm," he wrote in a memo to Esquire magazine reporter Ron Suskind. "It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."
In his written and spoken answers to questions, as recounted in the magazine's January issue, Mr. DiIulio describes Mr. Bush's senior political adviser, Karl Rove, as "enormously powerful, maybe the single most powerful person in the modern, post-Hoover era ever to occupy a political adviser post near the Oval Office."
That tends to confirm the Republican sources who referred to Mr. Rove, even during the 2000 campaign, as "Bush's brain."
Mr. Rove has done a good job of pleasing libertarians and the religious right by keeping "Bush 43 from behaving like Bush 41 and moving too far to the center or inching at all center-left," Mr. DiIulio says. As a result, Mr. DiIulio says, the administration has not accomplished much domestically except a tax cut and an education bill, which Mr. DiIulio describes as "really a Ted Kennedy bill."
Right. Just like the new Homeland Security Department was originally Sen. Joseph Lieberman's idea. Then Mr. Bush reluctantly embraced it and made it sound like his own.
"There is a virtual absence as yet of any policy accomplishments that might, to a fair-minded nonpartisan, count as the flesh on the bones of so-called compassionate conservatism," Mr. DiIulio says. What there is, he says, is "on-the-fly policy-making by speechmaking."
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer dismissed Mr. DiIulio's comments as "baseless and groundless" after the story broke Monday.
Another administration spokesman added that "good government is good politics" in the Bush White House, "not the other way around."
After all of that hyperventilation by the administration, Mr. DiIulio kicked into reverse and backed away from his earlier statements, apologizing for everything he said about anyone, whether he remembers saying it or not.
Mr. DiIulio portrays a Bush White House that is concerned, above all, with getting itself re-elected. In this, Mr. DiIulio reveals a keen grasp of the obvious.
It takes something of a visionary to put "flesh on the bones" of "compassionate conservatism." Mr. Bush has made it quite obvious that he is more of a do-er than a talker, a man of action more than a man of ideas. Like Ronald Reagan, whom Mr. Bush has called an important role model, the young W is interested in painting the broad strokes and leaving the explaining and other fill-in work to others.
Mr. DiIulio quit amid struggles with Congress and Christian conservatives over the direction of the president's faith-based initiatives. The legislation stalled in Congress amid fierce debates over how government might give money to religiously organized programs without running afoul of the constitutional separation of church and state.
It takes strong voices and heavy lobbying to push a bold and controversial issue like this one. Mr. DiIulio apparently lost his taste for the task. He abruptly bailed out and returned to the University of Pennsylvania, where he is a professor of politics, religion and civil society.
Having known Mr. DiIulio as a valuable source of ideas and insights since the 1980s and after perusing his memo on Esquire's Web site, this particular dust-up sounds to me like a classic disconnect between the idealism of an impatient intellectual and the hardball pragmatism of political strategists.
Nowhere in his memo does Mr. DiIulio sound anything but respectful and admiring of Mr. Bush. He ends on a note of hope that the "compassion vision" will be reanimated. I'm sure it will, if the White House thinks it makes good politics. Sometimes good politics does make good government. And cynical politics makes cynical government.
Clarence Page is a columnist at the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune Publishing newspaper. His column appears Fridays in The Sun. He can be reached via e-mail at cpage@tribune.com.