"You mean they have a domestic agenda?" [View All]

LAT: Bush's Agenda Loses Focus
The White House staff has failed to formulate a clear domestic policy, some in the GOP say, and the administration is suffering because of it.
By Peter Wallsten and James Gerstenzang, Times Staff Writers
March 19, 2006

WASHINGTON — A growing Republican chorus is calling for a staff overhaul inside President Bush's beleaguered White House, but some conservatives say such a change would stop far short of fixing what they view as a serious flaw: an unfocused domestic agenda.

The war in Iraq is dominating the attention of Bush and his top aides, these critics say, while the recent departure of the president's top domestic policy advisor after just one year has left the White House without an obvious conductor to direct the sometimes disparate policy-making machine.

"You mean they have a domestic policy?" quipped Michael Tanner, director of health and welfare studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.

Tanner, an author of the failed Social Security plan that was Bush's No. 1 domestic priority last year, lamented the lack of a "policy czar" setting clear goals. He described the administration as "exhausted" and "rudderless" on the domestic front.

"There doesn't seem to be an endpoint for what they're doing," he said. "They need to decide what they're going to do for the next three years…. Staff changes are necessary but not sufficient. If they're just rearranging chairs and office plaques, that's not going to do anything."...

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-disarray19mar19,0,2676970.story?coll=la-home-headlines