From EJ Dionne of the Washington Post:

WorkingForChange-Remember compassionate conservatism?

Kuo’s approach, then and now, was to criticize liberals for failing to see the promise of religiously based social action and to criticize conservatives for indifference to the poor. For Kuo, compassionate conservatism was not a political ploy. On the contrary, he was hoping its rise would encourage a serious dialogue across the lines of party and ideology about what a serious commitment to lifting up the poor would look like.

When I asked Kuo in 1998 to write an essay for a little book I edited on community and civil society, his title was characteristic: “Poverty 101: What Liberals and Conservatives Can Learn from Each Other.”

To this day, Kuo speaks warmly of the president he served. “No one who knows him even a tiny bit doubts the sincerity and compassion of his heart,” Kuo wrote on Beliefnet. In a phone conversation, Kuo insisted that his essay was not anti-Bush, but “in support of what Governor Bush said in 1999.”

I too thought Bush’s words about Compassionate Conservatism sounded good. It was when I saw who he was talking about appointing to his cabinet that I lost my postive vibes. And then I began to look at some of the Texas policies, and I got a clue about what kind of a politican he was. The Orwellian nature of his talk vs actual policy implementation and funding was a bad sign, and he has continued in that tradition.

Further, there are volumes of testimony from people like Kuo, and Diulio before him, and Richard Clarke, Joseph Wilson, Paul O’Neill, and even Colin Powell and Chrsitine Todd-Whitman, who heard the constant disparaging and cynical remarks about “the poor people stuff” and things like “pick a faith-based initiative, any initiative”. The experiences of the “experts” which the cabinet used only when they agreed with them; and when they didn’t tow the line, they soon found themselves excluded. Paul O’Neill as Secretary of the Treausury found himself slated to lead only a small discussion group and included in NONE of the major talks in a major economic summit put on by the White House, and the major dialogue was carried out by only those whose who stayed “on message”. Dionne goes on:

“From tax cuts to Medicare, the White House gets what the White House really wants,” Kuo wrote in his essay on Beliefnet.com. “It never really wanted the ‘poor people stuff.'”

People keep on defending this by saying “every administration has turnover of personell” and “that’s only one person” (which they use for each and every one as the numbers mount of people tired of being PR people instead of actually having their expertise taken seriously and intergrated into the way policy is determined.