Yesterday's New Dem Daily, which introduced the November/December issue of Blueprint magazine, highlighted a cover story by Joshua Green ("Putting Politics First: The Triumph of Rovery") on the heavily political nature of the Bush White House, which prefers, of course, to project the image of a high-minded policy orientation and a commitment to bipartisanship and the broad national interest. Green punctured this mask and showed a picture of a White House operation dominated by its political arm and focused relentlessly on rewarding Republican constituencies while peeling off strategically positioned Democratic or independent voting blocks through the crudest sort of pandering.

Now there's a rare insider account of the Bush White House that paints the same picture. John J. DiIulio, renowned academic, New Democrat policy innovator, and former head of the Administration's faith-based organizations initiative, was interviewed by Esquire for an article about the Bush White House. In addition to the interview, he also supplied Esquire with a five-page memo about his experiences in the Administration. Once the story broke, he disputed some of the quotes attributed to him from the interview, but not the substance of his memo, which is worth reading in full.

Amidst lavish praise for the President personally, and considerable appreciation for the skills of other key White House personnel, DiIulio calmly indicts the Administration for a fundamental lack of interest in domestic policy, especially when compared with its predecessors. "The Clinton administration drowned in policy intellectuals and teemed with knowledgeable people interested in making government work.... The Bush West Wing is very nearly at the other end of this Clinton policy-making continuum."

While DiIulio is best known for his involvement in the faith-based initiative, and his highly influential crime policy work in the 1990s, he's also a recognized authority on the nuts-and-bolts of policy development and government structure. So he was a more-than-casual observer of White House procedures. "In eight months, I heard many, many staff discussions, but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions. 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, non-stop, 20-hour-a-day White House staff."

Filling the vacuum created by a lack of interest in domestic policy, says DiIulio, was an obsession with political tactics and positioning. "This gave rise to what you might call Mayberry Machiavellis -- staff, senior and junior, who consistently talked and acted as if the height of political sophistications consisted in reducing every issue to it simplest, black-and-white terms for public consumption, then steering legislative initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible."

DiIulio got a very up close view of these tactics as the White House let an opportunity for early enactment of a bipartisan faith-based initiative go by. "They basically rejected any idea that the president's best political interests -- not to mention the best policy for the country -- could be served by letting centrist Senate Democrats in on the issue." (That, of course, was the story behind the story of the Administration's one big domestic accomplishment, the "Leave No Child Behind" education bill, where every effort was made to shove the centrist Democrats who thought up the reform initiative in the first place off the public stage, and instead share credit with the more traditional Democrats who are deemed to pose less of a political threat to Republicans.)

While DiIulio continues to believe in the President's good impulses on domestic policy, he notes: "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." And he is particularly caustic about "the remarkably slap-dash 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."

DiIulio's account differs from Joshua Green's in one, rather ironic, respect. Green treats chief political adviser Karl Rove as a purely political animal. DiIulilio, while agreeing that Rove is immensely powerful -- "the single most powerful person in the modern, post-Hoover era ever to occupy a political advisor post" -- is quick to say he is no mere political hack, but a "very well informed guy when it comes to certain domestic issues." The problem is that Rove "often supplies such policy substance as the administration puts out." That's the very definition of cold comfort.

We bring DiIulio's memo to your attention because the news "story" about the Esquire piece is fading before most observers understand what it was about. Even as DiIulio contradicted portions of the Esquire article that were based on phone interviews, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer denounced the allegations about the Administration as "groundless" and "baseless." There's not much doubt that the White House, which is notoriously manic about secrecy and loyalty among current and past staffers, unleashed the hounds of hell on DiIulio for breaking the "code." And by sundown yesterday, the Pennsylvania professor put out another statement "regretting" the whole incident.

But in the end, DiIulio has performed an important service, not only to the public but also to a President whom he obviously continues to respect and honor. DiIulio is a man whose reputation for objectivity and devotion to good public policy led both presidential candidates in 2000 to seek his counsel and speechwriting help. George W. Bush would be smart to brush aside the sandbagging efforts of the Mayberry Machiavellis on his staff and read DiIulio's memo in full.