NOT EVEN a war president and his fellow ideologues always get along. For example, House majority leader Dick Armey and President George W. Bush have their differences. Along with many conservatives, Armey doesn’t much like AmeriCorps, while Bush does. In fact, judging from the president’s State-of-the-Union pledge to expand AmeriCorps to several times its current size, Bush is hog-wild about the program. So it was on last Tuesday morning, at one of the majority leader’s weekly press briefings, that the subject came up.
Asked if Bush would have trouble getting his expansion plans passed, the majority leader stood firm: “As far as I can make it possible he will.” According to the Washington Times, Armey went even further, calling the very concept of AmeriCorps “obnoxious.” The Times account was notably droll, observing for instance that “Mr. Armey is retiring at the end of his term.” It also quoted Les Lenkowsky, who’s in charge of AmeriCorps, saying that Armey is “going to be looking for something to do next year, and if he’d like to become a member of AmeriCorps or–dare I say it–our Senior Corps program, we’d love to have him.”
