January 30, 2003
IN THE NAME OF LOVE:
Unlikely Allies Influenced Bush To Shift Course On AIDS Relief (Mike Allen and Paul Blustein, January 30, 2003, Washington Post)Administration officials said Bush, who had planned to announce the effort during a trip to Africa that had been scheduled for this month but was postponed, was convinced of the scale of the crisis in part because of trips to Africa last year by the outgoing Treasury secretary, Paul H. O'Neill, and by Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans.Evans said that he told Bush about the heartbreaking scourge he had witnessed and that Bush believes passionately that "we're here to serve other people and love our neighbors, and these are our neighbors."
The effort was championed inside the West Wing by Deputy Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten, who told a colleague several months ago, "We need to do something major on this." Michael Gerson, Bush's chief speechwriter, also took an early interest in the issue, and an administration official said he has talked for months about "the importance of speaking to this as a moral matter."
Several administration officials have become friends of Bono, the lead singer of U2, who said in an interview from Dublin that Bush's announcement shows how the world has changed. "If you think back just six months or a year, conservatives, especially religious conservatives, were very skeptical about this, and we had to explain that if you can't get the drugs, why would you test, and if you don't get people testing, we can't control the virus," Bono said. "All these points have sunk in."
It's been interesting to listen to interviews over the past few days and hear how genuinely thankful and truly perplexed folks in the AIDs community are that it's a religious conservative like George W. Bush who is doing this.
MORE:
How Bush got wise to world AIDS crisis (STEPHANIE NOLEN, January 30, 2003, Globe & Mail)
Bush's Moral Rectitude Is a Tough Sell in Old Europe (TODD S. PURDUM, January 30, 2003, NY Times)
The President rides out: George Bush's foes see him as an inarticulate bully. Friends say that evangelical faith underpins his every action. Ed Vulliamy, January 26, 2003, The Observer)