[HIMC] Karl Rove is Bush's Goebbels

[Luz Ogarrio]

Why Are These Men Laughing?
Ron Suskind
Esquire, January 2003

Maybe it’s because the midterm elections went so very well. Maybe it’s
because at the White House, politics is the best policy. Maybe it’s
because it’s the reign of Karl Rove. An inside look at how the most
powerful presidential adviser in a century does what does so well.

On a cool Saturday a few days before Christmas last year, Karl Rove
showed up in a festive mood at David Dreyer’s house in suburban
Washington, D. C., to trim the tree and have a cup of eggnog. Dreyer is
a liberal Democrat, formerly the deputy communications director in the
Clinton White House and also a senior adviser to Treasury secretary
Robert Rubin. He now runs a small public-relations firm. His daughter
and Karl’s son were in the same seventh-grade class. After a few brief,
friendly encounters at school functions, Dreyer invited Karl and his
boy over for a tree-trimming party with the class, about fifteen kids
and eight or nine parents in all. It was one of those enchanting days
that you remember for a long time. Rove was the ringmaster of fun,
brimming with good cheer, Mr. Silly, without a care in the world. All
in attendance were warmed by his presence, and you never would have
known that his job carried such awesome responsibility. Rove was far
too busy decorating cookies and stringing popcorn to betray anything
close to that. "Karl completely took charge, absolutely in the most
endearing way possible. He had a vision of what each kid could
contribute. What they could make or hang, based on how tall they were,
or what they could do . . . what ornament, what Christmas ball. Need
more lights? Hey, kids, let’s get in the car and go get some more
lights!" Dreyer, a sober man, is trying not to go overboard about how
all this affected him. "You expect a partisan who’s onstage all the
time, and it doesn’t function that way in real life. You get a father
and husband." He pauses. "I think it’s sad." What’s sad? I ask. "That
we so often have such an extraordinarily one-dimensional view of
people, of our fellow human beings." Not that Dreyer, having glimpsed
Karl in repose, far from his natural habitat, sees him as anything less
than extraordinary. "He was magnetic," Dreyer says dreamily. "He picked
up my four-year-old son, Sam, so he could place the star atop the tree.
It was lovely. Just lovely." 

When I heard this story, it made me like Karl Rove. It made him sound
like a hero to children, and in my view, there’s no better person. But
I’ve never heard another story like this one, because people in
Washington, especially Rove’s friends, are utterly petrified to talk
about him.

They heard that I was writing about Karl Rove, seeking to contextualize
his role as a senior adviser in the Bush White House, and they began
calling, some anonymously, some not, saying that they wanted to help
and leaving phone numbers. The calls from members of the White House
staff were solemn, serious. Their concern was not only about politics,
they said, not simply about Karl pulling the president further to the
right. It went deeper; it was about this administration’s ability to
focus on the substance of governing—issues like the economy and social
security and education and health care—as opposed to its clear
political acumen, its ability to win and enhance power. And so it
seemed that each time I made an inquiry about Karl Rove, I received in
return a top-to-bottom critique of the White House’s basic functions,
so profound is Rove’s influence. 

I made these inquiries in part because last spring, when I spoke to
White House chief of staff Andrew Card, he sounded an alarm about the
unfettered rise of Rove in the wake of senior adviser Karen Hughes’s
resignation: "I’ll need designees, people trusted by the president that
I can elevate for various needs to balance against Karl. . . . They are
going to have to really step up, but it won’t be easy. Karl is a
formidable adversary."

One senior White House official told me that he’d be summarily fired if
it were known we were talking. "But many of us feel it’s our duty—our
obligation as Americans—to get the word out that, certainly in domestic
policy, there has been almost no meaningful consideration of any real
issues. It’s just kids on Big Wheels who talk politics and know
nothing. It’s depressing. Domestic Policy Council meetings are a farce.
This leaves shoot-from-the-hip political calculations—mostly from
Karl’s shop—to triumph by default. No one balances Karl. Forget it.
That was Andy’s cry for help."

But now the stunning midterm ascendancy of the Republicans boosts Rove
into a new category; a major political realignment may hereby be
ascribed to his mastery, his grand plan.

At the moment when one-party rule returns to Washington—a state that
existed, in fact, in the first five months of the Bush presidency,
before Senator Jeffords switched parties—we are offered a rare view of
the way this White House works. The issue of how the administration
decides what to do with its mandate—and where political calculation
figures in that mix—has never been so important to consider. This White
House will now be able to do precisely what it wants. To understand the
implications of this, you must understand Karl Rove.

"It’s an amazing moment," said one senior White House official early on
the morning after. "Karl just went from prime minister to king. Amazing
. . . and a little scary. Now no one will speak candidly about him or
take him on or contradict him. Pure power, no real accountability. It’s
just ‘listen to Karl and everything will work out.’ . . . That may go
for the president, too."

Over time, I came to know these sources to be serious people with
credible information. And, of course, their fear of discovery is
warranted, for this White House has defined itself as a disciplined
command center that enforces a unanimity of purpose and has a
well-known prohibition of leaks, a well-known distaste for openness.
But still, the fact that they must veil themselves leaves them open to
the charge of being disgruntled employees. I can only attest to the
fact that they certainly do not seem to be that. There is, however, one
man who, at some personal and professional risk, has now decided to
speak openly about the inner workings of the White House.

President George W. Bush called John DiIulio "one of the most
influential social entrepreneurs in America" when he appointed the
University of Pennsylvania professor, author, historian, and
domestic-affairs expert to head the White House Office of Faith-Based
and Community Initiatives. He was the Bush administration’s big brain,
controversial but deeply respected by Republicans and Democrats,
academicians and policy players. The appointment was rightfully hailed:
DiIulio provided gravity to national policy debates and launched the
most innovative of President Bush’s campaign ideas—the faith-based
initiative, which he managed until this past February, the last four
months from Philadelphia.

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

In a seven-page letter sent a few weeks after our first conversation,
DiIulio, who still considers himself a passionate supporter of the
president, offers a detailed account and critique of the time he spent
in the Bush White House.

"I heard many, many staff discussions but not three meaningful,
substantive policy discussions," he writes. "There were no actual
policy white papers on domestic issues. There were, truth be told, only
a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy
substance and analysis, and they were even more overworked than the
stereotypical nonstop, twenty-hour-a-day White House staff. Every
modern presidency moves on the fly, but on social policy and related
issues, the lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual
interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking: discussions by
fairly senior people who meant Medicaid but were talking Medicare;
near-instant shifts from discussing any actual policy pros and cons to
discussing political communications, media strategy, et cetera. Even
quite junior staff would sometimes hear quite senior staff pooh-pooh
any need to dig deeper for pertinent information on a given issue."

Like David Stockman, the whip-smart budget director to Ronald Reagan
who twenty years ago revealed that Reagan’s budget numbers didn’t add
up, DiIulio is this administration’s first credible, independent
witness—a sovereign who supports his president but must, nonetheless,
speak his mind.

Sources in the West Wing, echoing DiIulio’s comments, say that even
cursory discussion of domestic policy became much less frequent after
September 11, 2001, with the exception of Homeland Security. Meanwhile,
the department of "Strategery," or the "Strategery Group," depending on
the source, has steadily grown. The term, coined in 2000 by Saturday
Night Live’s Will Ferrell, started as a joke at the White House, too,
but has actually become a term of art meaning the oversight of any
activity—from substantive policy to ideological stance to public
event—by the president’s political thinkers. 

"It’s a revealing shorthand," says one White House staff member. "Yes,
the president sometimes trips, rhetorically, but it doesn’t matter as
long as we keep our eye on the ball politically."

This approach to policy-making is a fairly radical departure from the
customary relationship between White House political directors and
policy professionals. Each has always influenced the other, of course,
but the political office has rarely been so central to guiding policy
in virtually every area, deciding what is promoted and what is tabled.

"Besides the tax cut, which was cut-and-dried during the campaign,"
DiIulio writes, "and the education bill, which was really a Ted Kennedy
bill, the administration has not done much, either in absolute terms or
in comparison with previous administrations at this stage, on domestic
policy. 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. There is still two
years, maybe six, for them to do more and better on domestic policy
and, specifically, on the compassion agenda. And, needless to say,
9/11, and now the global war on terror and the new homeland- and
national-security plans, must be weighed in the balance. But, as I
think Andy Card himself told you in so many words, even allowing for
those huge contextual realities, they could stand to find ways of
inserting more serious policy fiber into the West Wing diet and engage
much less in on-the-fly policy-making by speechmaking."

DiIulio calls the president "a highly admirable person of enormous
personal decency . . . [who is] much, much smarter than some
people—including some of his own supporters and advisers—seem to
suppose." So what, then, is John DiIulio’s motivation for now offering
his pointed critique? There is, as he says, "two years, maybe six." He
has a vision for who George W. Bush might yet become.

If you buy Isaiah Berlin’s famous dictum about history being a struggle
between foxes and hedgehogs, Karl Rove has, like the hedgehog, stayed
focused on a single ideal and pushed it forward relentlessly. A bookish
kid born in Denver on Christmas Day 1950, Rove has known George W. Bush
for thirty years. He started bobbing up on senior staffs of Texas
campaigns in his late twenties, with the unshakable goal of making the
Republicans the permanent majority party. He’s up early and works late,
with an assured disdain for Marquis of Queensberry rules of political
engagement. In conversation with scores of people who know him, the
assessment ultimately is the same: For Karl Rove, it’s all and only
about winning. The rest—vision, ideology, good government, ideas to
bind a nation, reasonable dissent, collegiality, mutual respect—is for
later.

And Rove is disciplined in maintaining his mystery. In visiting the
White House frequently from February to April of this past year, I
interviewed much of the senior staff, as well as the First Lady. No one
would utter so much as a word about Rove. They’d talk about one
another, assessing the strengths, weaknesses, and specific roles of
Hughes, Card, deputy chief of staff Josh Bolten, media adviser Mark
McKinnon, communications chief Dan Bartlett, Cheney aide Mary Matalin,
national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice, the vice-president, and, of
course, the president himself. When I’d mention Rove, the reaction was
always the same: "I can’t really talk about Karl." It was odd; it was
extraordinary.

Eventually, I met with Rove. I arrived at his office a few minutes
early, just in time to witness the Rove Treatment, which, like LBJ’s
famous browbeating style, is becoming legend but is seldom reported.
Rove’s assistant, Susan Ralston, said he’d be just a minute. She’s very
nice, witty and polite. Over her shoulder was a small back room where a
few young men were toiling away. I squeezed into a chair near the open
door to Rove’s modest chamber, my back against his doorframe.

Inside, Rove was talking to an aide about some political stratagem in
some state that had gone awry and a political operative who had
displeased him. I paid it no mind and reviewed a jotted list of
questions I hoped to ask. But after a moment, it was like ignoring a
tornado flinging parked cars. "We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We
will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!" As a
reporter, you get around—curse words, anger, passionate intensity are
not notable events—but the ferocity, the bellicosity, the violent
imputations were, well, shocking. This went on without a break for a
minute or two. Then the aide slipped out looking a bit ashen, and Rove,
his face ruddy from the exertions of the past few moments, looked at me
and smiled a gentle, Clarence-the-Angel smile. "Come on in." And I did.
And we had the most amiable chat for a half hour. I asked a variety of
questions about his relationship with Karen Hughes. Were there ever
tensions between him and Karen? Nope. "Oh, we’re both strong-willed
people, but we work well together." I mentioned a few disputes others
had told me of. He dismissed them all. Didn’t they sort of bury the
hatchet after September 11? Nope—no hatchet to bury. As the president’s
two most powerful aides, did they ever disagree? "Not often." Any
examples? Nope. He couldn’t be nicer, mind you. Finally, I asked if one
of his role models was Mark Hanna, the visionary political guru to
President William McKinley who helped reshape Republicans into the
party of inclusion and ushered in decades of electoral victory at the
turn of the twentieth century. Rove’s a student of McKinley and Hanna.
He has talked extensively in the past about lessons he’s learned from
this duo’s response to challenges of their era. "No, this era is
nothing like McKinley’s. I’m not at all like Hanna. Never wanted to
be."

Since then, I’ve talked to old colleagues, dating back twenty-five
years, one of whom said, "Some kids want to grow up to be president.
Karl wanted to grow up to be Mark Hanna. We’d talk about it all the
time. We’d say, ‘Jesus, Karl, what kind of kid wants to grow up to be
Mark Hanna?’ " In any event, it’s clear, when I think of my encounter
with Rove, why this particular old friend of his, and scores of
others—many of whom spoke of the essential good nature of this man who
was a teammate on some campaign or other—don’t want their names
mentioned, ever. Just like Rove’s mates on the current team—the one
running the free world—who go numb at the thought of talking frankly,
for attribution, about him. These are powerful people, confident and
consequential, who suffer gaze aversion when I mention his name. No
doubt they’ve had extended exposure to the two Karls I William Kristol,
among the most respected of the conservative commentators—a man
embraced by the Right but still on dinner-party guest lists for the
center and Left—is untouchable. He is willing to speak. 

"Karl and I aren’t really friends. I have sort of a vague and indirect
relationship with him. But we talk pretty regularly. He has always been
fair and straight and honest with me, despite the stories that others
have about him." He pauses, as though encountering one of those beware
falling rocks signs. "I believe Karl is Bush. They’re not separate,
each of them freestanding, with distinct agendas, as some people say.
Karl thinks X. Bush thinks X. Clearly, it’s a very complicated
relationship." He goes on to say that he thinks Bush is a "canny
manager" who creates competing teams and plays them against one
another. As for those who sometimes disagree with that point, he says,
"There is criticism of Karl from the friends of the former President
Bush who don’t approve of the way the current President Bush is doing
his job in every case." Kristol notes that "the kid is what he is, and
he’s different from the father, some differences that I feel good
about," but that gray men around "41" who don’t approve of "43" have
trouble criticizing the son to the father "and ascribe everything to
Karl’s malign influence." In that, Rove is at the center of the most
portentous father-son conversation of modern times. Sources close to
the former president say Rove was fired from the 1992 Bush presidential
campaign after he planted a negative story with columnist Robert Novak
about dissatisfaction with campaign fundraising chief and Bush loyalist
Robert Mosbacher Jr. It was smoked out, and he was summarily ousted. 

Mark McKinnon, who would not speak of Rove in my earlier interviews
with him for another story on the Bush White House, is now effusive.
"Karl’s sheer bandwidth is greater than anyone I’ve ever met. . . .
Lots of people have planetary systems, covering history or policy or
politics, but Karl covers the whole universe." He goes on: "James
[Carville] and Dick [Morris]"—both advisers to Clinton whom McKinnon
knows from his days, up until the mid-1990s, as a Democratic
consultant—"can drive the car and drive it very well. Karl can take out
the engine and put it back together. He’s the best ever. And his love
for policy is as great or greater than his love of politics." This is
the Rove defense. He’s really a policy guy, a seeker of best remedies,
a nonpolitical. 

Senator John McCain knows something of Karl Rove, though he’d rather
not think about all that tonight, as a crowd gathers to celebrate the
release of the senator’s new book. In fact, lots of folks here know
Rove well. "Sure, I know Karl," says one man who has worked on several
campaigns with him. "At the end of long days, we’d always meet at one
bar or another, everybody but Karl. Where’s Karl? we’d wonder. The line
was always ‘Oh, he’s out ruining careers.’ "

These are virtually all Republicans, gathered in an elegant room off
the wide atrium of Union Station. It’s a good night for McCain. He and
the intellectually lithe Mark Salter, his longtime aide, have produced
their second book in just three years. The first, Faith of My Fathers,
documented McCain’s early life as the rebel son and grandson of
legendary admirals who was shot down in Vietnam and held prisoner for
five and a half years. This second book, which picks up after Vietnam,
is more reflective, angry, and lyrical, as McCain bares his breast and
beats it a little. At sixty-six and in middling health, he’s settling,
it seems, on the idea that he won’t get a chance to be president. It’s
the kind of thing that has liberated his already libertine spirit,
though it stands as tragic injustice to everyone else in the room. And
people in various corners of the wide room are retelling the story
again—they’ll tell it forever—the moment when McCain surged in the New
Hampshire primary, when he caught, and won the state in a walk. The
Bush juggernaut had stalled. McCain, embraced by the media, to whom he
gave extraordinary access—"just hang with me, boys, all day, everything
on the record"—was seizing the high middle ground, where you win
presidential elections. And someone points to a guy in the room—yeah,
him over there near the curtains, tall, friendly-looking guy named John
Weaver. He was the other genius wunderkind in Texas in the 1980s, along
with Rove. They won campaigns left and right, those two. Rove was
mostly a direct-mail fundraiser back then, Weaver more a
strategist-manager type. Something happened that neither will talk
about, and they stopped working together in 1988. Many of the people in
this room followed Weaver, who was McCain’s political director in his
bid for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, to this side of
the Republican party. Since their estrangement, Weaver’s relationship
with Rove has gotten somewhat odd. 

On the night of the vote in New Hampshire, the senator’s senior staff
was all gathered at the Crowne Plaza in Nashua. A call came in to the
penthouse suite moments after McCain’s big victory was declared by the
networks. It was Rove. A junior staffer cupped his hand over the
receiver and told Weaver: "Rove says he’s calling to concede."

Weaver was stunned. "Karl’s conceding?" He shook off disbelief,
gathered himself, and said, "Tell Karl that he can’t concede. He’s not
the candidate. The governor has to bring himself to actually call the
senator." Weaver gave Karl a cell-phone number where McCain could be
reached, and a few minutes later, the candidates had a brief chat. Then
it was off to the showdown in South Carolina, which changed everything
. . .

I suddenly hear McCain laugh through the din. He laughs like a pirate.
There’s a cluster, bent in tight, as he whispers something hysterical.
Heads go back. Man can tell a story. Tonight he is ebullient. On
Sunday, The Washington Post gushed over his book, leading with what it
called the strange occurrence that the president is the
third-most-popular politician in America, behind Al Gore, who got more
votes, and, of course, John McCain.

He loved that, God knows, and tonight he’s among his lovers, his
troops, cutting between them, slapping and clasping, a man of modest
height and fiercely angled, always leaning a few degrees forward, a bit
pinched, in his blue suit. He breaks from the cluster; I meet him in
the clearing. We huddle for a moment, make small talk about this and
that. I ask if historians will consider South Carolina a crossroads
moment for the Republican party. "Well, it was unprecedented, South
Carolina," he says softly. "But you have to put it past you and move
on." He points over to the corner where his top aide, Salter, is now
standing next to Weaver and a few others. "Those guys can tell you all
about what happened. As for history," he says, offering a pained smile,
"I think it will little note nor long remember and all that." I go
over. Weaver gets asked about Rove quite often; people know about their
history. He always demurs. "Not worth getting into," he says. People
around him, though, will talk. "John will never work in the Republican
party again, thanks to Karl," says Salter. Weaver now works for the
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. It’s commonly held that
Rove ran him out of the party. The word went out: Any Republican who
hired Weaver would be held in disfavor by the president. "What can I
say?" Weaver says quietly. "Like me, all the moderate Republicans have
been run out of the party by the Right. I’m doing what I’ve always done
politically; these guys just call themselves Democrats now."

As for the Waterloo of South Carolina, most of the facts are
well-known, and among this group of Republicans, what happened has
taken on the air of an unsolved crime, a cold case, with Karl Rove
being the prime suspect. Bush loyalists, maybe working for the
campaign, maybe just representing its interests, claimed in parking-lot
handouts and telephone "push polls" and whisper campaigns that McCain’s
wife, Cindy, was a drug addict, that McCain might be mentally unstable
from his captivity in Vietnam, and that the senator had fathered a
black child with a prostitute. Callers push-polled members of a South
Carolina right-to-life organization and other groups, asking if the
black baby might influence their vote. Now here’s the twist, the part
that drives McCain admirers insane to this very day: That last rumor
took seed because the McCains had done an especially admirable thing.
Years back they’d adopted a baby from a Mother Teresa orphanage in
Bangladesh. Bridget, now eleven years old, waved along with the rest of
the McCain brood from stages across the state, a dark-skinned child
inadvertently providing a photo op for slander. The attacks were of a
level and vitriol that even McCain, who was regularly beaten in
captivity, could not ignore. He began to answer the slights, strayed
off message about how he would lead the nation if he got the chance,
and lost the war for South Carolina. Bush emerged from the showdown
upright and victorious . . . and onward he marched.

Eight months after the South Carolina primary, McCain and Weaver were
on a plane campaigning with the nominee. This was the kind of
barnstorming finale—closing in on the last week of the campaign—that
Rove normally wouldn’t miss. But Weaver was with McCain on the plane,
and if Weaver is present, Rove will not show. The governor was,
nonetheless, ecstatic. With McCain at his side for the better part of
two weeks, he’d been on fire. After a stop in Fresno, California, for a
joint speech, Weaver slipped out of the hall and Bush slipped out after
him. McCain, who was still inside working the crowd, was due to leave
now, his promised time with Bush completed. McCain had told
Representative Tom Davis, a Virginia congressman heading up the
Republican congressional effort, that he’d spend the last week
whistle-stopping House and Senate races.

Governor Bush approached Weaver, who was huddling with the McCain
staff. They’d known each other for fifteen years. "Johnny, I want you
and John to be with me until the end."

"Can’t do it, George," Weaver said. "I just talked to Tom Davis, and
he’s really counting on us. We’ve made a commitment."

Bush grew agitated. "You don’t seem to understand. I want you with us!"
It was already clear that the race was very close. Bush was looking for
every advantage. He said, "Look, I’m better when John’s with me."
Bush said, "Hold on a minute," stepped away, placed a call on his cell
phone, and walked back, looking relieved. "Look, I just talked to Karl,
and he says don’t worry about the congressional races. It’s okay for
you to come with me."

Weaver said, "Thanks anyway, but Karl’s not in charge of us." McCain
walked up. "Weav says you can’t stay with me for the last week. Is that
right, John?" Bush was simmering. McCain was uncertain what to do.
After an awkward moment, Weaver said, "I’m sorry, we’ve really got to
go," and hustled McCain into a waiting limo. The senator slumped into
the seat, exhaled, and then, with a smile of relief, turned to Weaver
and said, "Thank you."

I’ve come to meet John DiIulio. 

It has been three weeks since our first interview, when he spoke with
surprising frankness about the style and substance of the White House.
Other White House officials had discussed and corroborated the range of
Rove’s influence, how all major decisions were passing first through
his political-strategic directorate. But I was still regarding this
White House in terms of the long-standing model, in which the art of
political strategy is carefully balanced against serious policy
discussion, in which church-state separations of these two distinct
functions are respected, even championed.

It seemed that in the person of Karl Rove such distinctions had been
blurred. And I hoped that DiIulio, a true believer in problem solving
through sober policy analysis, could clarify how this had happened. He,
after all, was present when the architecture of this White House—and
the key relationships in it—was established. 

But even more striking, he is the most credible independent witness to
exit the administration so far.

I race into the Sofitel Hotel in downtown Washington a little late for
a cocktail party held by the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of
Government, a nonpartisan think tank based in Albany, New York, that
has brought luminaries together to kick off its three-day conference on
religion and social-welfare policy. The French-owned hotel has little
bustle in its portico—all cool marble and polished mahogany and
whispery potted hydrangeas—and I wander, searching for life, until I
see an enormous man near the elevator banks. He’s stuffing his hand
into a shoulder-slung briefcase, looking for his glasses. He doesn’t
seem to fit here, or in his blue suit, pulled taut as a windbreak
across a frame a few inches shy of six feet that has to be supporting
three hundred pounds. He looks up and squints at me, his glasses now
slightly askew on a gentle, soft-edged mug, like Big Pussy in The
Sopranos.

His story is as unlikely as it is inspiring: a working-class kid from a
tough Italian-Catholic neighborhood, the son of a sheriff’s deputy and
a department-store clerk, who stumbled forward from a local parish
school to Philadelphia’s exclusive Haverford School—there through a
program for lower-income kids—then to the University of Pennsylvania
and Harvard for graduate school, picking up speed with each stride. By
the time he got his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard—one of the
best students his mentor James Q. Wilson had ever seen—his mass times
velocity was bending laws of physics. At Princeton, he was made a full
professor after just five years. He was thirty-two. 

We talk briefly about our conversation of a few weeks ago; DiIulio
knows he has collapsed a wall by offering his frank assessment. "I’m on
the record," he says. And then, lightly, "It’s not a problem, really
not."

His appearance in Washington qualifies as a special event, a top ticket
for the guests tinkling glasses inside, where John stops at the
reception table. 

"Hey, big man!" He turns. It’s the Reverend Eugene Rivers, the former
gang member who tamed urban violence in Boston, and a DiIulio buddy.
They hug as the hive notices DiIulio and surrounds him. They are fans,
admirers, but also part of an ideal, that there’s nothing odd about
Democrats and Republicans dining together and agreeing on a few things,
even in regard to fault-line issues like religion and social policy and
the bracing possibility of connecting the two. 

And disagreeing constructively. Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the
Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism and a liberal opponent of
federal funding for faith-based institutions, makes small talk with
Rivers—a conservative black supporter of such funding—while nearby is
Harris Wofford, the former Democratic senator from Pennsylvania, right
beside Michelle Engler, wife of Michigan’s Republican governor, John
Engler. This kind of ecumenical promise, political as well as
religious, is what helped get George W. Bush elected—the ideal, at its
heart, of "compassionate conservatism" and the pledge of returning a
more civil tone to Washington.

"There he is, the face of compassionate conservatism," says Richard
Roper, who was DiIulio’s colleague at Princeton. "Whatever that means."
DiIulio has often found himself an enemy of the Left. During the
Clinton impeachment drama, he beat the drum for Clinton’s removal from
office and decried the failure to do so as a signal of the
"paganization" of American political culture. And before that, research
he conducted in the early 1990s identified the growth of what he called
"superpredators" in urban America: youths who seemed to carry a
virulent strain of unchecked violence. The research, born of DiIulio’s
focus on urban America and prison cultures, formed an intellectual
framework for mandatory-sentencing statutes that swept the country.
DiIulio coauthored Body Count with conservative thinker William Bennett
and built a thinking-writing-speaking franchise as the conservatives’
favorite intellectual. Then he did something that almost no
academician, especially one atop his own mountain, seems ever to do: He
said, Hold on a minute. Data he’d started collecting in the mid-1990s
seemed to contradict the "superpredator" theory. What this latest
evolution of his research showed was that prevention, especially
targeted at "at risk" urban environments, really does work.

And that brought him to church. Churches—along with mosques and, in
some cases, synagogues—have long stood as a bulwark against chaos in
many blighted urban cores, as true sanctuary and often an engine of
homegrown social services. Urban analysts know this in a general way;
DiIulio wanted to know, as a serious researcher, the whys and hows,
variables, structures, etiology, and outcomes. This turned out to be a
very bright idea; he swiftly captured an enormous swath of unmapped
territory. The early trend line of DiIulio’s research evolved into his
work for the president.

DiIulio and Bush bonded. At a Philadelphia stop early in the campaign,
the two spoke for nearly two hours about the possibilities of federal
support for faith-based programs, a nuanced discussion that left
DiIulio duly impressed. "The president is up to the task. We had an
extraordinary exchange. He had significant knowledge and real
sensitivity to the challenges that such an effort would face. It’s not
as though he’s not capable."
Bush started talking about his friend "Big John," and a year later
DiIulio was an anchor tenant in the new administration. He would attend
the 7:30 a.m. senior-staff meeting every day and offer insights on a
broad array of domestic policies while launching programs that, in some
fashion, used federal financial support to enhance the efforts of
faith-based institutions.

Meanwhile, the White House’s political arm was asserting itself in the
new Office of Strategic Initiatives, which Rove created. In this period
before September 11, 2001, domestic affairs accounted for most of what
the White House did every day. So John DiIulio and Karl Rove started to
regularly encounter each other, forming one of the most interesting
couples in the executive branch.

Each, after all, is among the most accomplished in his field. Rove, the
consummate political strategist, having trained at the knee of the
master, Lee Atwater, who guided Republicans, including George H. W.
Bush, to electoral victory; and DiIulio, the public intellectual and
academic heavyweight, the only one to join this administration. In
almost every realm of public policy, there are always a few people who
lead the intellectual parade, advancing the research and ideas that
form the agenda for discussion in that field. It’s a ferocious
meritocracy, played out in symposia and academic journals, on
peer-review committees and editorial pages. Generally, administrations
tap several of these leaders to join them. Republicans and Democrats
both have their share. In economics, for instance, think Milton
Friedman or Herbert Stein; they can sometimes be young up-and-comers,
like Pat Moynihan in the Nixon administration. In the Clinton White
House, they were numerous, including Robert Reich at Labor and Lawrence
Summers, Clinton’s Treasury secretary and now the president of Harvard.


It’s clear, standing in this room with DiIulio, why such men can be so
valuable to a president: In the White House, where political
calculation is like respiration, they can make confident, fact-based
assessments of which important ideas are worth executing. Ideas,
ultimately, that a presidency will be remembered for. 

The cocktail party is moving toward dinner. Doors are opened to a
baronial chamber that cossets a stunning forty-foot-long table. Almost
time for DiIulio’s speech. He doesn’t seem to notice. His wide back is
to the door and he’s digging deep, trying as he will to make sense of
his strange journey.

He says he loves Bush. He loves him as a man, as a friend. He loves his
decency, his compassion, which, he says, is "not a ‘feel your pain’
thing like Clinton. With Bush it’s more grounded, more real." 

But mention of Clinton turns him inward, tapping repressed memory. He
says he visited the White House five times during the Clinton
presidency—Al Gore called upon DiIulio in the mid-1990s to assist with
his reinventing-government initiative.

Clinton, DiIulio says, was a wonk-in-chief. "For all his flaws, he had
that monster to feed. Bush is just too ‘normal,’ " DiIulio says,
curling his thick fingers into quotation marks around the word normal,
this huge man with profound hungers. "Great guy. But he doesn’t have a
beast to feed, that got-to-know-the-answer beast. It’s a problem being
president at this time, without that, without that hunger."

Then he pauses, and we’re both thinking the same thing. Karl. DiIulio
smiles his cockeyed smile. "Yeah, he’s got a beast. One problem: He’s
not the president."

Two days later, I get a very long letter from John DiIulio. 

It is a manifesto, really, the work of a scholar, reasoned and sober.
It is designed to be constructive criticism of the White House that, in
large measure, Karl Rove has created, and to give context to his
remarks of a few weeks before. Early on, in its opening section,
DiIulio, thinking like a historian, offers a stream of qualifiers. "I’m
no ‘representative sample,’ as it were, but I do have some things that
are maybe worth saying now on the record."

In the letter, DiIulio is charitable toward his former colleague. "Some
are inclined to blame the high political-to-policy ratios of this
administration on Karl Rove," DiIulio writes. "Some in the press view
Karl as some sort of prince of darkness; actually, he is basically a
nice and good-humored man. And some staff members, senior and junior,
are awed and cowed by Karl’s real or perceived powers. They self-censor
lots for fear of upsetting him, and in turn, few of the president’s top
people routinely tell the president what they really think if they
think that Karl will be brought up short in the bargain. Karl is
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. The Republican base constituencies, including Beltway
libertarian policy elites and religious-Right leaders, trust him to
keep Bush 43 from behaving like Bush 41 and moving too far to the
center or inching at all center-left. Their shared fiction, supported
by zero empirical electoral studies, is that 41 lost in ’92 because he
lost these right-wing fans. There are not ten House districts in
America where either the libertarian litany or the right-wing-religious
policy creed would draw majority popular approval, and most studies
suggest Bush 43 could have done better versus Gore had he stayed more
centrist, but, anyway, the fiction is enshrined as fact. Little happens
on any issue without Karl’s okay, and often he supplies such policy
substance as the administration puts out. Fortunately, he is not just a
largely self-taught, hyperpolitical guy but also a very well informed
guy when it comes to certain domestic issues." 

According to various sources close to Rove, he and DiIulio had a wary
but respectful relationship. DiIulio, like any heavyweight with his own
constituency, didn’t seem to fear Rove. Rove, who never graduated from
college but has a deep love of academic inquiry, seemed to enjoy having
DiIulio to fence with. Periodically, he would ask John to advance the
administration’s political agenda, and John would do what almost no one
does currently at the White House now that Karen Hughes has left: tell
Karl to take a hike.

For instance, there was Karl’s desire to have John cozy up to the
conservative evangelicals, with whom DiIulio was having problems.
DiIulio recalls Karl telling him to bury the hatchet "and start
fighting the guys who are against us." DiIulio says he responded: "I’m
not taking any shit off of Jerry Falwell. The souls of my dead Italian
grandparents are crying out to me, ‘That guy’s not on the side of the
angels.’ " Rove backed off, DiIulio recalls, and said, "Look, those
guys don’t really matter to this president."

"Sure, Karl," DiIulio responded. "They don’t matter, but they’re in
here all the time."

On his primary mission—push forward ideas and policies to partner
government with faith-based institutions—DiIulio says that he saw the
beginning of what was to become a pattern: The White House "winked at
the most far-right House Republicans, who, in turn, drafted a so-called
faith bill that (or so they thought) satisfied certain fundamentalist
leaders and Beltway libertarians but bore few marks of compassionate
conservatism and was, as anybody could tell, an absolute political
nonstarter. It could pass the House only on a virtual party-line vote,
and it could never pass the Senate, even before Jeffords switched. 

"Not only that, but it reflected neither the president’s own previous
rhetoric on the idea nor any of the actual empirical evidence. . . . I
said so, wrote memos, and so on. . . . As one senior staff member
chided me at a meeting at which many junior staff were present and all
ears, ‘John, get a faith bill, any faith bill.’ Like college students
who fall for the colorful, opinionated, but intellectually third-rate
professor, you could see these twenty- and thirty-something junior
White House staff falling for the Mayberry Machiavellis." 

DiIulio defines the Mayberry Machiavellis as political staff, Karl Rove
and his people, "who consistently talked and acted as if the height of
political sophistication consisted in reducing every issue to its
simplest black-and-white terms for public consumption, then steering
legislative initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible.
These folks have their predecessors in previous administrations (left
and right, Democrat and Republican), but in the Bush administration,
they were particularly unfettered." 

"Remember ‘No child left behind’? That was a Bush campaign slogan. I
believe it was his heart, too. But translating good impulses into good
policy proposals requires more than whatever somebody thinks up in the
eleventh hour before a speech is to be delivered."

Weekly meetings of the Domestic Policy Council "were breathtaking,"
DiIulio told me. As for the head of the DPC, Margaret La Montagne, a
longtime friend of Karl Rove who guided education policy in Texas,
DiIulio is blunt: "What she knows about domestic policy could fit in a
thimble." 

When DiIulio would raise objections to killing programs—like the Earned
Income Tax Credit, a tax credit for the poorest Americans, hailed by
policy analysts on both sides of the aisle, that contributed to the
success of welfare reform—he found he was often arguing with
libertarians who didn’t know the basic functions of major federal
programs. As a senior White House adviser and admirer of DiIulio’s
recently said to me, "You have to understand, this administration is
further to the right than much of the public understands. The view of
many people [in the White House] is that the best government can do is
simply do no harm, that it never is an agent for positive change. If
that’s your position, why bother to understand what programs actually
do?"

It was encounters with the president—displays of his personal
qualities—that time and again restored DiIulio’s commitment. From the
way he "let detainees come home from China and did not jump all over
them for media purposes" to a time, DiIulio writes, when he and Bush
were in Philadelphia at a "three-hour block party on July 4, 2001,
following hours among the children, youth, and families of prisoners .
. . running late for the next event. He stopped, however, to take a
picture with a couple of men who were cooking ribs all day. ‘C’mon,’ he
said, ‘those guys have been doing hard work all day there.’ It’s my
favorite and, in some ways, my most telling picture of who he is as a
man and a leader who pays attention to the little things that convey
respect and decency toward others."

Five days later, on July 9, at the administration’s six-month
senior-staff retreat, DiIulio writes that "an explicit discussion
ensued concerning how to emulate more strongly the Clinton White
House’s press, communications, and rapid-response media relations—how
better to wage, if you will, the permanent campaign that so defines the
modern presidency regardless of who or which party occupies the Oval
Office. I listened and was amazed. It wasn’t more press,
communications, media, legislative strategizing, and such that they
needed. Maybe the Clinton people did that better, though surely they
were less disciplined about it and leaked more to the media and so on.
No, what they needed, I thought then and still do now, was more
policy-relevant information, discussion, and deliberation."

Part of the problem, DiIulio now understood, was that the paucity of
serious policy discussion combined with a leakproof command-and-control
operation was altering traditional laws of White House physics. That
is: Know what’s political, know what’s policy. They are different. That
distinction drives the structure of most administrations. The policy
experts, on both domestic and foreign policy, order up "white papers"
and hash out the most prudent use of executive power. Political
advisers, who often deepen their knowledge by listening carefully as
these deliberations unfold, are then called in to decide how, when, and
with whom in support policies should be presented, enacted, and
executed.

The dilemma presented by Karl Rove, DiIulio realized, was that in such
a policy vacuum, his jack-of-all-trades appreciation of an enormous
array of policy debates was being mistaken for genuine expertise. It
takes a true policy wonk to recognize the difference, and, beyond the
realm of foreign affairs, DiIulio was almost alone in the White House. 

"When policy analysis is just backfill to support a political maneuver,
you’ll get a lot of oops," he says. 

DiIulio points to the "remarkably slapdash character of the Office of
Homeland Security, with the nine months of arguing that no department
was needed, with the sudden, politically timed reversal in June, and
with the fact that not even that issue, the most significant
reorganization of the federal government since the creation of the
Department of Defense, has received more than talking-points-caliber
deliberation. This was, in a sense, the administration’s problem in
miniature: Ridge was the decent fellow at the top, but nobody spent the
time to understand that an EOP [Executive Office of the President]
entity without budgetary or statutory authority can’t coordinate over a
hundred separate federal units, no matter how personally close to the
president its leader is, no matter how morally right it feels the
mission is, and no matter how inconvenient the politics of telling
certain House Republican leaders we need a big new federal bureaucracy
might be."

One has to consider the possibility that John DiIulio just wasn’t cut
out for working at the White House. Government, after all, is not a
graduate seminar. I need to get a reality-based assessment on what the
professor himself is proffering. DiIulio’s last day running the
faith-based initiative was February 1, 2002. He never intended to stay
for long, he says, and the commute from Philadelphia was becoming
onerous. And though he remains in regular touch with former colleagues,
he is not there now—not in the building. I talk to several sources in
the West Wing, and one of them agrees to meet me at a neutral site: a
restaurant off Pennsylvania Avenue with a dark back room. It’s
midafternoon. We order coffee. He is nervous about a face-to-face. "You
know, this is risky, just being here."

I tell him we’ll try to make this quick, and I describe DiIulio’s
rendering of the White House, its conduct and character, and Rove’s
enveloping role. Does this resemble reality, or is DiIulio mistaken or
misguided?
He nods. "All of that is realistic, basically correct. It’s really been
even worse since after 9/11. There has been no domestic policy, really.
Not even a pretense of it."

He pauses. "You know, if John had stayed, we might have actually had a
domestic policy. He’s just that smart, that credible. The reason is
that he’s rigorous, that he demands the data. He asks, What does the
evidence indicate? What is the best path? He truly doesn’t care about
politics, which is all anyone here seems to care about. He just digs in
to actually see what policy would most benefit the most people."

We talk for more than an hour. He’s an honored member of the political
Right with a flawless conservative pedigree and pure faith in ideas
emerging from that flank of the Republican party. But he is as pointed
in his critique of the processes of this White House as the more
moderate DiIulio. It’s clear from every word that this is not about
politics or ideology. It’s not about who’s right or wrong. It’s about a
kind of regret.

"Don’t you understand?" he says, his voice rising. "We got into the
White House and forfeited the game. You’re supposed to stand for
something . . . to generate sound ideas, support them with real
evidence, and present them to Congress and the people. We didn’t do any
of that. We just danced this way and that on minute political
calculationsand whatever was needed for a few paragraphs of a speech."

He says that in mid-August, Jay Lefkowitz—a longtime policy manager who
was hired in early 2002 to work as Margaret La Montagne’s deputy at the
Domestic Policy Council—became part of an effort to create some forward
motion. He and a small group of senior staffers started to meet each
week or so to discuss domestic issues and long-term goals. "They’re
attempting to at least generate some ideas. It’s a small sign of hope .
. . but everything will have to go through Karl."

We sit for a while and sip coffee, now cold. He says he’s not going to
leave—he waited too long to get to the White House—but that
increasingly he finds himself thinking in the past tense, of missed
opportunities.

"Here’s what would have worked," he says a bit later. "Swap DiIulio in
for [deputy chief of staff for policy] Josh Bolten. Bolten’s a good
guy, a smart guy, but DiIulio knows more about everything, every area
of policy, than anyone. He would have helped us have the balance—the
considerate, thoughtful approach to everything—that administrations are
supposed to have."

Shortly after this conversation came the midterm elections. Early the
morning after, my White House sources were on the phone, offering the
insider view.

"It’s unbelievable," one of them says, awe coming across the phone
line. "Could Karl be that smart? Could anyone?"

There’s just silence for a bit as he maps the frontiers of possibility.

"Maybe the last two years wasn’t just a case of benign neglect," says
this source, with whom I spoke extensively throughout October. "Maybe
it was brilliant neglect."

He went on to explain: From early on, Rove may have been focused on
energizing the core, the far Right, for the midterms. An attempt to
push centrist policies through a divided Congress would have done
anything but that, and it would have violated the prime strategic
directive: don’t alienate the right wing like the first President Bush.
Karl’s remedy: co-opt the policy-creation process; put it in a lockbox
until after genuine Republican control is established.

"Now the troops are ready to march," the source says. "The question is,
What will we do? Will we finally put together a thoughtful policy team
to create a coherent plan for America’s future, or just push through
one political favor after another dressed up like policy? I guess it’s
really for Karl, Karl and the president, to decide."

----
John DiIulio knows that because of what he’s done here, he will lose
friends. The White House will personally attack him. Some longtime
Republican colleagues will suddenly be too busy to return his calls.
Others may spread rumors. Karl Rove, who would not comment for this
story, might say that DiIulio’s manifesto is "duly noted." Rove likes
to say that after doling out a condemnation—that someone’s actions have
been duly noted. It’s a very adult version, with teeth, of "This will
be put on your permanent record."

But DiIulio and an increasing number of people in the White House seem
to have their eye on a somewhat different permanent record.
 


__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com