Posted on 12/09/2002 7:51:25 AM PST by dirtboy
I CAN SEE from the Daily News' Friday editorial ("A Penn professor gets a lesson from Bush") that you are puzzled, dismayed and disappointed by my statements of last Monday concerning the Esquire magazine article. You may not like or accept my reasons, but I will give them.
Sixteen months ago, I left the White House after serving the half-year I publicly said I would when I took the job. I stayed just long enough to complete the only task at which I had any special skill, namely "Unlevel Playing Field," a study exploring how government discriminates against grassroots religious groups in its grant-making processes. The report is still at www.whitehouse.gov.
During my first year out of the White House, I turned away journalists interested in my time in the Bush administration.
Then, in September, I got a call from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a journalist who already had interviewed my former White House senior staff colleagues. He was interested in the administration's domestic and social policy apparatus. I didn't have the time for sit-down interviews, but, in a free moment in October, I bundled his questions in my head, and dashed off a semi-stream-of-consciousness memo.
I stupidly supposed that my remarks would be used selectively as but one inside viewpoint of many, and that - given my pre-White House status and my well-known New Democrat leanings and academic posture - people would naturally consider the source. I have taken issue with and apologized sincerely for things in the article, but I surely cannot and do not blame the journalist for my own bozo-brained mistake.
My missive was sloppy, and as entire books are written by ex-administration officials who were there much longer and saw much more than I did, and as historians do their work, we will all know better how things really worked there.
Nor can I blame anyone but myself for completely underestimating how, my self-definition as an independent-minded professor and centrist Democrat policy wonk notwithstanding, my public reflections - even had they been balanced, as I had stupidly assumed they would be, by more knowledgeable and more sympathetic others - were bound to be received entirely as those of an "ex-White House official," and hence to be hyper-newsworthy.
Ditto for my writing such smart-aleck but empty phrases as "Mayberry Machiavellis" to refer to people whose public-spirited characters, whatever policy lacks I or other armchair quarterbacks might identify with them, are superior to my own. I made very plain to all my deep respect, affection and admiration for the president himself, but the staff deserved much better from me, too.
Regarding my apologies, my first statement stands. My second two-sentence statement, the one in which I accept verbatim White House press secretary Ari Fleisher's characterization of my criticisms as "baseless and groundless," stands, too. But as your editorial pointedly suggested, it requires clarification, which I now provide even at the risk of adding instant autobiography to the list of things for which I need to be sorry.
To wit: My dad died in my arms in August after a three-year battle with illness. I thought mainly of him on Monday. He always taught me that when you apologize to people, you apologize "with no half-smile, with all your heart, and on your knees, or not at all."
In other words, whether completely culpable or not, and whether there are complicated mitigating if not exonerating motivations and circumstances or not, you do not express honest, heartfelt remorse for wrong by quibbling over how the wronged person or persons characterize it. In this case, my cultural-paternal conditioning, plus my Catholic self-examination of conscience, accounts for my repeat of Mr. Fleisher's words. Basta.
Finally, my biggest moral and mental error was to get into personnel at all when all that truly matters is institutional dynamics, policy and results. On domestic policy, there is plenty enough about the latter over which to debate and disagree.
On civic results, the president came to Philadelphia on July 4, 2001, to celebrate a program that puts caring adult mentors, mobilized via local churches, into the lives of the low-income children of prisoners. Quality mentoring has been proven to dramatically improve the life prospects of all, including the most severely at-risk youth.
The Philadelphia program has grown since the president's visit, and is being replicated in other cities. But there are nearly 2 million children in this country with one or both parents behind bars, and this need, like so many social needs, can only be met if we all follow where the president has led: "Government cannot be replaced by charities, but we must welcome them as partners, not resent them as rivals."
Anyhow, this flap has hastened a decision, in the works for many months, to end my 16-year public intellectual journey, the better to take up my private community-serving ministry journey: No more general political or popular writing, more academic research and teaching focused on faith-based organizations, and redoubled volunteer service and fund-raising.
I am grateful to God that we each have, and sometimes rediscover in the oddest or most painful way, our own special charge to keep.
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With a dad like that, how'd this guy end up a democrat?
Apologies are an awfully cheap coin these days. It's a pleasure to find one with the full metal weight of contrition inside it.
Indeed. Whatever his politics, this guy has more character than most people we'll ever meet.
Wow. Whatever I thought about this guy before, that is extremely well-put. Moving, in fact.
In fact, it's better than I've expressed it to my own kids. Count on them to start hearing some form of it ere long.
Dan
PS -- but I can't help but think, "And this guy is in the same party as BILL CLINTON, the uncontested master of precisely the sort of non-apology 'apology' this man's dad abominated?" Ay, yi yi.
and posibly taking his first step towards having his eyes opened about the Democratic Party in the year 2002.
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