When history looks back at the disgrace of the Bush presidency, the one celebrated quote that will help capture much of what went wrong will be John DiIulio’s. It was DiIulio, the first director of the president’s White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, who told Ron Suskind, “What you’ve got is everything — and I mean everything — being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis.”
DiIulio wasn’t expressing disgust so much as disappointment. A conservative Dem and serious academic, DiIulio thought Bush’s White House would be a place where ideas and policy mattered. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s rather difficult not to laugh.
But DiIulio was taken in by the bogus pitch. He notes today in the Philadelphia Inquirer that it was eight years ago this week that Bush delivered his first campaign speech, which DiIulio helped write, titled “The Duty of Hope.” Candidate Bush rejected as “destructive” the idea that “if only government would get out of the way, all our problems would be solved.” Rather, “from North Central Philadelphia to South Central Los Angeles,” government “must act in the common good, and that good is not common until it is shared by those in need.” There are “some things the government should be doing, like Medicaid for poor children.”
Forget what I said about laughing; with the benefit of hindsight, it’s rather difficult not to cry.
DiIulio pauses today to take stock of what happened to “compassionate conservatism.”
[P]overty rates have risen in many cities. In 2005, Washington fiddled while New Orleans flooded, and the White House has vacillated in its support for the region’s recovery and rebuilding process. Most urban religious nonprofit organizations that provide social services in low-income communities still get no public support whatsoever. Several recent administration positions on social policy contradict the compassion vision Bush articulated in 1999.
In May, Bush rejected a bipartisan House bill that increased funding for Head Start, a program that benefits millions of low-income preschoolers…. Last week, Bush threatened to veto a bipartisan Senate plan that would add $35 billion over five years to the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). The decade-old program insures children in families that are not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid but are too poor to afford private insurance. The extra $7 billion a year offered by the Senate would cover a few million more children. New money for the purpose would come from raising the federal excise tax on cigarettes.
Several former Bush advisers have urged the White House to accept some such SCHIP plan. So have many governors in both parties and Republican leaders in the Senate. In 2003, Bush supported a Medicare bill that increased government spending on prescription drugs for elderly middle-income citizens by hundreds of billions of dollars. But he has pledged only $1 billion a year more for low-income children’s health insurance. His spokesmen say doing any more for the “government-subsidized program” would encourage families to drop private insurance.
But the health-insurance market has already priced out working-poor families by the millions. With a growing population of low-income children, $1 billion a year more would be insufficient even to maintain current per-capita child coverage levels. Some speculate that SCHIP is now hostage to negotiations over the president’s broader plan to expand health coverage via tax cuts and credits. But his plan has no chance in this Congress; besides, treating health insurance for needy children as a political bargaining chip would be wrong.
“Wrong.” How quaint. As if the president still is grounded to notions of morality.
Frankly, when the debate over S-CHIP began recently, and the president vowed to veto expansion on ideological grounds, the idea that Bush might support “compassionate conservatism” never even occurred to me. I’d actually forgotten about it.
It was, of course, a fraud in 1999, allowing Bush to sell himself as a “different” kind of Republican. It’s easy to forget, but for a lot of well-intentioned voters weighing their choices in 2000, Bush almost seemed to mean it.
In DiIulio’s case, he fell for the con. I think he regrets it now.