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

• Author: Alter, Jonathan

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...