These days, a Democratic president who proposes $8 billion in new federal spending on after-school programs, drug treatment, prisoner rehabilitation, and welfare-to-work initiatives is likely to be laughed out of Washington. After all, there are only two kinds of politicians who propose that kind of thing anymore: loony, unreconstructed, quasi-socialist left-liberals -- and Republicans.
So no one thought it remarkable when, last week, George W. Bush proposed just such new spending under the aegis of a brand new federal bureaucracy, the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. In fact, the new office is being pitched as a chance to transcend a traditional partisan debate: the one between liberal secularists who like the idea of spending more on social services but fear federally-supported proselytizing, and social conservatives who like the idea of providing social services but fear federal imperialism.
I n Bush's formulation, the rationale...