When [tag]Claude Allen[/tag] was forced to resign from the White House after getting caught in some unfortunate shoplifting incidents, the West Wing was temporarily without a chief domestic [tag]policy[/tag] advisor. It probably didn’t matter too much — the Bush gang shows about as much interest in policy as the president shows in sightseeing in France — but yesterday, the [tag]White House[/tag] announced Allen’s replacement.
[tag]President[/tag] [tag]Bush[/tag] appointed a longtime scholar at the American Enterprise Institute yesterday to be his top domestic policy adviser, a post that has been vacant since February, when Claude A. Allen stepped down after being charged with stealing more than $5,000 in a phony refund scheme.
[tag]Karl Zinsmeister[/tag], who has worked the past 12 years as editor in chief of the American Enterprise magazine, is slated to assume his White House post June 12. At the institute, he focused on examining cultural issues, as well as social and economic trends. His columns for the magazine included pieces praising Wal-Mart’s efficiency and extolling the role of religion in forming the glue that bonds communities.
Zinsmeister has almost no experience in government — he worked on the Hill 20 years ago — but with an extensive writing background, [tag]Zinsmeister[/tag] naturally offers potential White House critics plenty of material to comb through. The WaPo noted, for example, that Zinsmeister wrote nearly a year ago, “With the exception of periodic flare-ups in isolated corners, our struggle in Iraq as warfare is over,” a boast that was silly at the time, but even less credible now.
But as it turns out, that’s just the tip of the rhetorical iceberg. The New York Sun’s Josh Gerstein reviewed some of Zinsmeister’s recent work to help get a better understanding of the new top-policy dog for the White House. Unfortunately, I’m afraid he’ll fit right in with the ideologues who are already there.
In a 2004 interview with the Syracuse New Times, the future White House aide declared, “People in Washington are morally repugnant, cheating, shifty human beings. The mom who charters a bus for her kids to go to a rave is as bad as the lady with the crackpipe. We have sickness at the top and bottom of our society and we have a big middle, sensible with common sense and decency and morality.”
Just as with Mr. Snow, some of Mr. Zinsmeister’s writings could cause embarrassment to the White House. He has engaged in some mild criticism of Mr. Bush’s budget policies. In a recent issue of the American Enterprise, Mr. Zinsmeister wrote, “Though he talks a good line about battling government bloat, our current president has shown an eerie lackawanna when it comes to actually keeping a lid on the federal Pandora’s box.”
Mr. Zinsmeister has also written candidly on race, arguing that black communities have developed crippling problems that overlap in a way unseen in other parts of America. “The point of the conservative concern over black underclass life is that the pathologies run so much deeper there,” he wrote in 1996, citing his mentor Moynihan. “We desperately need to find out what it is in contemporary [tag]black[/tag] culture that makes for these exceptional breakdowns.”
The American Prospect’s Greg Sargent added that Zinsmeister wrote about [tag]race[/tag] relations in 1996, “The brutal reality is that whether in the selection of juries or the choice of neighborhoods to live (or get lost) in, colorblindness has become a real risk today…The penalty for the person who, ignoring race, turns down the wrong street today can literally be death.”
I’m curious — where does the White House find these guys?