White House has no Policy apparatus

What is meant by "policy" is a strategy for making government accomplish its functions effectively and efficiently. It is the essence of governance. Governance differs from the political process of getting elected. This is what John DiIulio,
former Bush director of the White House Office Of Faith-based and Community
Initiatives, had to say about the White House:

"there is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: complete lack of a policy apparatus. Besides
the tax cut, which was cut and dried during the campaign, and the education bill, which was really a Ted Kennedy bill, the administration has not done much, either in absolute terms or in comparison to previous administrations at this stage, on domestic policy. What you've got is everything, and I mean everything, being run by the political arm.

It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis. [They] consistently talked and acted as if the height of political sophistication consisted in reducing every issue to its simplest black-and-white terms for public consumption, then steering legislative initiatives or policy proposals as far right as possible."

The former White House director confides, "I heard many, many staff discussions but not three meaningful, substantive policy discussions. There were no actual policy white papers on domestic issues. There were, truth be told, only a couple of people in the West Wing who worried at all about policy substance and analysis ... Every modern presidency moves on the fly, but on social policy and related issues, the lack of even basic policy knowledge, and the only casual interest in knowing more, was somewhat breathtaking: discussions by fairly senior people who meant Medicaid but were talking Medicare; near-instant shifts from discussing any actual policy pros and cons to discussing political communications, media strategy, et cetera ."

This is a reflection of Bush's nature. He is a highly emotional man with little patience for policy discussions or analysis. That is the explanation for his famed "intuitive" decision-making process. It is ideologically based, with little time spend collecting and analyzing facts.

As we have seen, his intuition has not been an especially reliable guide for Presidential decisions. If nothing else, the invasion of Iraq has been described by one General as the greatest strategic blunder ever made by an American government. Sadly, we can't say there is nothing else that demonstrates the disaster in the White House.