Mayberry Machiavellis

SUSKIND: I think John DiIulio speaks for other people who are in the White House now. Many of whom talked, for not for attribution, that there's a kind of a sense of regret that this administration never embraced the idea that we will provide best remedies, that we will be a place from which ideas emerge. Ultimately a presidency tends to be judged on that. What good ideas were executed and what were the results?

What happened here was that from the start, there was almost no serious policy discussion, according to not only John DiIulio but many folks I talked to within the White House. Instead, it was all about rather short-term political calculation. Which is why, as John and others say, at this point, two years in to this presidency, there's almost no policy that one can point to as a success for this president.

WOODRUFF: There is a remarkable line in here. Again, from John DiIulio, he says, quote, "There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy substance and analysis..." That's very tough.

A true Mayberry Machiavelli decides he wants to see more of his children.

Claude Allen..., the President’s principal domestic policy adviser, resigned abruptly this week, citing the old Washington Classic about spending more time with one’s family. Allen was a Movement Conservative with strong ties to the fundamentalist Christian element of Bush’s base and acted as “point person on abstinence initiatives.”

Rumor is he quit after losing a fight with Rumsfeld to allow military chaplains "to be more explicit about their faith."

That's what the "principal domestic policy adviser (forgetting, I guess, Karl Rove)" spends his time on.

Worst. Administration. Ever.