Blaming the Bureaucracy for a Lack of Democracy

This anecdote from Peter Baker's Washington Post piece Monday on bureaucratic resistance to President Bush's second-term democracy-building initiative is making the rounds of the blogosphere:

Defiance of Bush's mandate could be subtle or brazen. The official recalled a conversation with a State Department bureaucrat over a democracy issue.

"It's our policy," the official said.

"What do you mean?" the bureaucrat asked.

"Read the president's speech," the official said.

"Policy is not what the president says in speeches," the bureaucrat replied. "Policy is what emerges from interagency meetings."

I tend to agree with my colleague Matt Yglesias' take on this: "The bureaucrat is sounding silly and, well, bureaucratic here, but in a fundamental sense he's exactly right. The president gave a speech about the democracy agenda, but he never put a democracy agenda together." Saying that "policy emerges from interagency meetings," does sound hopelessly bureaucratic, but good solid policy in fact does -- as opposed to the airy concepts that are laid out in speeches (which, of course, ought to form the basis of good policy).

And I'd go a couple of steps further:

• First, this variant of the "blame the bureaucracy" theme is a very convenient and effective tool for politicians. Indeed, Baker's lead to the story has President Bush referring to himself as a "dissident" within his own government when trying to explain slow progress on his initiative to a gathering of opposition leaders from various authoritarian countries. That's like saying you'd love to play golf with your buddies on Saturday morning, but your wife just won't let you.
• Second, this is typical of the kind of blame-shifting that occurs at the end of presidential administrations. "Look," administration officials want to say, "it's not likely we didn't have big ideas, and we even tried to act on them. But the mean ol' bureaucracy got in the way." It's a way of preemptively deflecting criticism of their own actions (or lack thereof).