Semi-Daily Journal

Looking at the Bush Administration

John Dean writes about "a conference organized by Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School to review the first two and half years of the Bush presidency... [and] to make... [an] impartial assessment [of it]. The papers presented and panel discussions, later posted online, speak for themselves...

I don't think that the papers at http://www.wws.princeton.edu/bushconf/schedule.htm speak for themselves. Perhaps the academic policy papers--by Allen Schick, by Charles O. Jones, and by Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay do--but the rest are by and large written in the alusive insider style reminiscent of how one spoke of the Sultan in the declining days of the Ottoman Empire that is so common in Washington.

For example, consider this passage from John DiIulio's paper, in praise of Bush--or is it?

During the aforementioned July 4, 2001 block-party gathering with the children and families of prisoners in Philadelphia, the president engaged the crowd with unusual passion and warmth, even by his normal standards. They responded in kind. The event ran over.... A staff colleague advised me that we really needed to move him out... in front of the church through which we were to exit... there stood two male cooks and a huge pile of barbecued ribs... the president paused. "C'mon," he said, "those guys have been doing hard work all day there. Can't eat but we can say thanks." We walked over to take a picture with the two cooks. Bush lifted the table aside himself, squeezed us in behind it, and took several pictures with the men, pulling me by my super-sweat-soaked shirt into one shot. For senior staff, being in White House photos with the president, including, in my case, several in the Oval office, is common. But that photo with Bush and the barbecue guys is the one that speaks loudest and speaks legions about his core, small "d" democratic presidential character.

Why, then, I am often asked, has the administration made few major social policy efforts on behalf of the needy and neglected? I do not know, but there are at least two possibilities. One explanation relates back to presidential character. Veteran journalist Joe Klein contends that while Bush "used words like love and heart more than any other presidential candidate" he had ever seen, when "suffering became an abstraction--a budget item--Bush lost the sensitivity he had when he confronted poor people directly." Another possibility is that, like most other recent White House teams, Bush and his team have few meaningful political incentives to develop detailed policy plans or worry about administrative matters on anything other their one or two top priorities...

In the first part of the passage, DiIulio tells us that for George W. Bush, "Message: I care." He connects. He cares.

In the second part, he offers two explanations for why George W. Bush's "caring" does not translate into "social policy efforts on behalf of the needy and neglected." The first is Joe Klein's: caring is personal, while budgeting is professional, and George W. Bush does not link the two. This, in turn, could mean any of two things: (i) there is a failure of intelligence and empathy on George W. Bush's part, so that he doesn't realize what budget numbers mean for the lives of the people at the block party; (ii) George W. Bush simply has an advanced and highly-developed case of the politician's standard dissociation between what you say and what you do--as California Speaker Jesse Unruh said in the 1960s, "If you can't drink their liquor, take their money, [censored], and still vote against them, you don't belong in politics."

The second explanation is that "Bush and his team have few meaningful political incentives" to do anything on secondary issues that do not attract press attention. But in earlier administrations the business of government would roll along even without "political incentives" because administration officials and congressional members and staff did care about getting policy right: that's why everybody is in politics and government, after all--because they care about getting policies right for America. Is DiIulio saying that the Bush White House is unique in its lack of concern for the effect of its actions on America and its future? Certainly some of DiIulio's earlier statements support such an interpretation.

But I cannot pretend that I know what DiIulio really means here.