I spoke too soon. Read John DiIulio’s letter to Esquire about the Bush administration. If I were in the White House, I’d take large parts of it to heart. It’s sane, smart, generous when merited, no more than usually self-interested and at times very telling. There is a lack of a coherent, compelling social policy agenda in this administration. And some of this seems to come from an overly politicized and intellectually incurious management:
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.
One exception was stem-cell research. But after that, the well runs dry. DiIulio is particularly shrewd about healthcare policy:
During the campaign, for instance, the president had mentioned Medicaid explicitly as one program on which Washington might well do more. I co-edited a whole (boring!) Brookings volume on Medicaid; some people inside thought that universal health care for children might be worth exploring, especially since, truth be told, the existing laws take us right up to that policy border. They could easily have gotten in behind some proposals to implement existing Medicaid provisions that benefit low-income children. They could have fashioned policies for the working poor. The list is long. Long, and fairly complicated, especially when – as they stipulated from the start – you want to spend little or no new public money on social welfare, and you have no real process for doing meaningful domestic policy analysis and deliberation. It’s easier in that case to forget Medicaid refinements and react to calls for a “PBOR,” patients’ bill of rights, or whatever else pops up.
The result is a slow drift toward socialized medicine, as dictated by the agenda of the Democrats. Ditto with education, where Teddy Kennedy has had more influence than any Republican, neocon or neolib. I understand why the war has usurped some of these priorities – and rightly so. But the lack of any substance behind the domestic agenda is a very worrying sign – and one reason, I think, that Bush’s re-elect numbers are so low. People like what he’s done but have no clear idea of what he wants to do domestically in the byears ahead. Reading DiIulio, I wonder if the president does either.
FISKING THE SOCIAL RIGHT: Stanley Kurtz gets the full treatment from young libertarian, Julian Sanchez.
The Dish 