Cruelly Compassionate

"Tenderly devastating" is how David Kuo refers to John DiIulio's op-ed piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Bush's stand on insurance plan contradicts words of compassion:

DiIulio notes that it was eight years ago this week that Bush delivered the first public policy speech of his campaign, titled 'The Duty of Hope' where he rejected extreme Republican notions that government should just get out of the way and let our social problems solve themselves. Rather, government had to help 'in the common good, and that good is not common until it is shared by those in need.

In his retrospective piece on the lie of "compassionate conservatism," DiIulio observes:

On the other hand, poverty 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.

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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.

DiIulio realized the scam of the Bush Administration early on, and moved on. He is the author of the "Mayberry Machiavelli" quote, see The Mayberry Machiavellis Are At It Again, which without a doubt is the legacy of the Administration. As Steve Benen writes at Talking Points Memo:

When history looks back at the Bush presidency, one of the more celebrated quotes 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, along with Rao and a host of other former White House officials, finally understood the dissembling of the Administration. Compassionate Conservatism is code for cruel, cold-hearted conservatism. Once he understood that, DiIulio, who was a believer in the policy, not the politics, had to leave.

Tags: Commentary, Politics, Religion