SHORTLY AFTER the inauguration, Vice President Dick Cheney explained to Stephen Goldsmith, the former mayor of Indianapolis, how the new White House office of faith-based initiatives would be set up. But Goldsmith, Bush’s first choice to head the office, had his own ideas, a counterproposal that included bestowing cabinet status on the head of it. Cheney was surprised. “You don’t make a counter-proposal to the president,” he said.
So John DiIulio, a Democrat, Catholic, scholar, and one-time adviser to Al Gore, became the assistant to the president in charge of faith-based initiatives. This is a signature project of the Bush presidency, touted early and often by Bush during the campaign. And DiIulio seems perfectly suited to run it: He knows more about grass-roots programs run by churches than anyone and believes fervently in them. Goldsmith, the odd man out, will be an unpaid adviser and chairman of the Corporation for National Service, which runs Americorps and other volunteer programs.
Bush and DiIulio are an odd couple and a mutual admiration society. Bush is from West Texas, DiIulio from South Philadelphia, where he still lives. Bush is low-key and eager to please. DiIulio is intense and intent on persuading. Both have Ivy League backgrounds, but while Bush was an indifferent student, DiIulio was a star pupil of James Q. Wilson at Harvard and went on to become a professor at Princeton and now the University of Pennsylvania. Both are working in new fields. Bush failed in the oil business but succeeded as president of the Texas Rangers baseball team. DiIulio’s academic specialty is public administration, but he’s made his name in criminology and social policy. Bush told an aide last week, speaking of DiIulio, “I love that guy.” DiIulio said of Bush: “I have total faith in this man’s heart.” Oh, yes, Bush’s nick-name for DiIulio is “Big John.”
The two almost didn’t connect. DiIulio was known to Bush through his chief political strategist, Karl Rove. He is a prolific writer (including as a contributing editor to this magazine). “I’d read his stuff for years,” Rove says. But when an aide to then governor Bush tried to invite DiIulio to a meeting in Austin in early 1999, he didn’t respond. A half-dozen calls went unanswered. Finally, Goldsmith called, and he agreed to come. Normally, DiIulio says, “I don’t hang with Republicans.” And his experience with politicians had been unsatisfactory. “They invite you in, do 20 minutes, and hand you off.” But, from their first meeting, he found Bush to be different. “He was engaged for the full two hours,” DiIulio says.
What pleased DiIulio most was the absence of politics. Bush wanted to know what a faith-based initiative would involve and what programs might work. Later, in July 1999, Bush delivered a speech on compassionate conservatism in Indianapolis. That morning, he called DiIulio, who was vacationing at the Jersey shore, to thank him for his advice on the speech. It was only months earlier that DiIulio had met with Al Gore and advised the Democratic candidate on his own plans for supporting faith-based programs. Gore gave a tepid speech on the subject in May 1999.
The Bush-DiIulio relationship was sealed in June 2000 after Bush had won the Republican presidential nomination. Bush had come to Philadelphia for a speech, and DiIulio was asked to wait around to chat afterwards. They conferred for two hours, first just the two of them, then with Goldsmith and Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge. Once more, the subject was social policy, not politics. Bush was in “the what’s good, what works, and think-big box,” says DiIulio, which was what attracted him to Bush in the first place. As president, DiIulio figured, Bush would “surprise a lot of people. And he has.”
What has DiIulio learned that others haven’t about faith-based projects to aid the poor? He’s been studying them for a half-dozen years, notably through his Center for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society at Penn. First, he says, one has to be realistic about what, say, a church project can achieve. The chief characteristic of “highly effective outreach ministries” is that they form partnerships with other groups, often secular ones. Second, running these ministries does not conflict with saving souls, the main job of religious groups. On the contrary, such work can help “protect the religious and sacred characteristics of their organizations,” DiIulio insists. Third, the country is crawling with small, unsung but effective programs that could reach more people if they had government and private funding.
“Washington can potentially play a useful role,” DiIulio says. But it’s not a slam dunk. The idea of building on grass-roots ministries is “promising but not proven.” In other words, empirical evidence that lives will be improved is lacking. “From a social science standpoint, the jury is still out.” However, DiIulio adds, “there’s something going on here. It’s what the good nuns said. Do the right thing in the right way and you’d be amazed what you can achieve.” For DiIulio, strengthening local ministries and community efforts is “intellectually, morally, and in civic terms what I care most about.”
When Bush collected a group of advisers in Austin in early January to talk about faith-based programs, DiIulio seemed unlikely to be Bush’s pick. DiIulio skipped the meeting, instead taking his three kids to New York to see Beauty and the Beast on Broadway. Then on day five of the Bush presidency, he got a call from a White House aide offering him the faith-based job.
DiIulio was reluctant initially, particularly because of his friendship with Goldsmith. He also worried that Goldsmith’s demise might mean a trimmed-down program. But in two days of talks with senior Bush aides, he became convinced the president intends to give strong emphasis to the program. The last problem was the title of the office. Bush aides wanted it to be the Office of Community and Faith-Based Initiatives. If that was the case, DiIulio said, they would have to get someone else to run it. He wanted the words Faith-Based to come first, since expanding efforts by religious groups is what’s new and significant about the program. To get DiIulio on board, the Bushies gave in. A very smart decision on their part.
CORRECTION-DATE: March 26, 2001
CORRECTION:
We are reliably informed that a couple of details in an article in our February 12 issue (“The Minister of Ministries,” by Fred Barnes) were incorrect. Stephen Goldsmith, the former mayor of Indianapolis who had been George W. Bush’s first choice to head the faith-based initiative, did not ask for cabinet status or meet with Dick Cheney about the job.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
