Bush domestic policy blasted

WASHINGTON — A former member of the Bush administration said in a magazine interview that the White House values politics over domestic policy, lacking both policy experts and an apparatus to support them, and it has failed to achieve a "compassionate conservative" agenda.

John J. DiIulio Jr., a Democrat and a domestic affairs expert and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was appointed by President Bush to head the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in the second week of the new administration. He quit in August 2001 amid struggles with Congress and Christian conservatives over the direction of the president's plan to give more federal money to religious charities.

In an interview with Esquire magazine, DiIulio said: "There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you've got is everything, and I mean everything, being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."

"Mayberry Machiavellis" is DiIulio's term for the political staff and most particularly Karl Rove, Bush's chief adviser. He describes 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."

Bush's spokesman Ari Fliescher dismissed DiIulio's criticism as "baseless and groundless."

DiIulio said the religious right and libertarians trust Rove "to keep Bush 43 from behaving like Bush 41 and moving too far to the center or inching at all center-left."

As a result, DiIulio said, the administration has accomplished almost nothing domestically except Bush's tax cut and an education bill, which DiIulio described as "really a Ted Kennedy bill."

"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," he said. What there is, he said, is "on-the-fly policy-making by speechmaking."

DiIulio did not directly criticize Bush in the article. A White House spokeswoman said White House advisers had not seen the article and would not comment on it.

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Contributing: Associated Press.