Status Kuo (Am I First? Do I Get a Prize?)

Sorry. That pun writes itself.

Clearly, I missed the first wave of stuff surrounding the release of David Kuo's "tell-all" book on his time in the Bush administration's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. But I'd like to think I caught one of the best echoes so far.

Time posted an excerpt from the book, but space limitations strip it of context and, for me anyway, raised more questions than answers. I learned more, however, from the interview Kuo did with Newsweek.

I would love to do some excerpts, but my evil, crap-tacular MAC has other ideas; either that or Newsweek has devised some anti-blogging measures that prevent the copy-pasting from their content (assbags).

In any case, the key points of interest come with Kuo's comments on the naivete on evangelicals as they approach the political world. But the most revelatory passage - particularly from Kuo's point of view, who doesn't seem to bear ill-will toward the White House - appears in the stuff around what happened after John DiIulio's 2003 Esquire magazine interview with Ron Suskind. (That, for the reocrd, was the source of the "Mayberry Machiavellis" line.)

So, here, thanks only to my cursed stubbornness and willingness to type long-hand, is the relevant passage (Oh, I'll see you in HELL Newsweek!):

"Frankly...the single greatest progress we ever made on the compassion front was after John DiIulio did a controversial Esquire article. After that occurred - and I go into this in great detail in the book - the White House paid more attention to the compassion agenda in the 48 or 72 hours after that than they ever paid in the 2-and-a-half years that followed. I'm an optimist and a big believer in the president's agenda, especially on poverty."

The real mystery is why Kuo added that line at the end: what's that got to do with what preceded it?

In any case, what Kuo describes amounts to a habit of mind for the Bush administration. Stage-management and sales trump policy, funding, coordination - the actual work of governance. They do far too much for show for anyone's benefit - even their own.