White House Daze: The Unmaking of Domestic Policy in the Bush Years.

The best way to find out what's going on inside any large institution--including the White House--is a couple of layers down from the top. The third- and fourth-tier people may not go to all the important meetings or see much of the president, but they know a lot and they love to dish. The problem is that what they actually know first-hand is often affected by a tendency toward inflating their own roles.

Kolb, a deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy under George Bush, has that skewed perspective. His book is not nearly as engaging as John Podhoretz's Hell of a Ride, and Kolb's axe-grinding for himself and the other self-styled "New Paradigm" policy intellectuals pushing the supplyside/empowerment agenda is irritating. Anyone who agrees with him is a genius; anyone on the other side is a lightweight and a knave. The blows he lands are clumsy and often stale. The stories he tells are frequently trivial, amounting to nothing more than somebody blocking somebody else's memo.

And yet the overall effect is a devastating indictment of the Bush administration's utter failure on the domestic side. We already knew that Bush's presidency was "devoted to an in-box mentality that worshiped process over progress." What's new are the details of the sheer stupidity of the in-fighting. Roger Porter, the Harvard professor who was Bush's domestic policy chief and Kolb's immediate boss, comes across as almost a parody of a timid, ass-covering time-server who lives to play tennis on the South Lawn with the president, visiting governors, and other members of the White House tennis club. He "spent countless hours worrying over such trivia as font sizes and the width of page margins." Porter wasn't lazy, just appallingly reactive and a complete pushover for Richard Darman, the true villain of the book.

The best Darman story here involves Education Secretary Lauro Cavazos. Darman wanted an $8 million piece of pork for Dan Rostenkowski's alma mater in Chicago, Loyola University. Because Darman knew that Cavazos would object, he waited until the hapless cabinet officer was in Europe, then had one of his deputies use the department's autopen to affix the secretary's signature to the document needed to approve the grant. When Darman learned that Kolb had alerted Cavazos that his signature had been forged, Kolb became a walking dead man at the White House. (If the gassy memos he excerpts here are any indication, he probably was already.)

Kolb is stunned to learn that even after it was clear that the 1990 budget deal raising taxes was a political disaster, Bush continued to let Darman run the White House. He's right to condemn the budget director's "Brother, Can You Paradigm" attack on the series of fresh ideas (school vouchers, loser pays in court cases) that Jim Pinkerton and other conservatives offered. Some of the so-called "New Paradigm" was solid, and some of it was silly, but Darman's fundamental cynicism--his notion that Beltway number-crunching, not ideas, was all that mattered--was ultimately self-defeating.

I knew Bush was in trouble when one of Darinan's deputies, Tom Scully, told me that health care reform was a "second term issue." If Bush had even made a stab at addressing fundamental domestic issues, he would have been able to rebut many of Bill Clinton's attacks and possibly would have won the election. Kolb cites an anonymous quote from a Bush aide in The New York Times that summarized the basic problem: "Keep playing with the same toys. But let's paint them a little shinier." In the end, what doomed Bush was as much the do-nothing notion of "No new toys" as "No new taxes."