Forgive me if you have, but I hadn't seen this great anecdote from David Kuo's juicy book, Tempting Faith, an insider's account of the Bush White House's corrupt "faith-based" policymaking. It deals with a controversial December 2002 Esquire piece in which Bush's former faith-based czar, John DiIulio, was quoted trashing Bush's policy operation as hollow and Bush's overall "compassionate conservative" agenda as having accomplished nothing. After the article appeared, writes Kuo:

A West Wing friend called to say the president heard about the article as he walked from the Oval office of the OEOB. He was angry. "Well," he yelled through the stairwell, "is he right or isn't he? Have we done compassion or haven't we? I wanna know."

An hour later we got the first and only call from the deputy chief of staff Josh Bolton's office requesting an urgent "compassion meeting." In the two years since the transition, it was the first time the president's senior staff fully engaged in the compassion agenda....

The president's question first needed to be answered. He wanted to know how much we had spent on compassion programs in his first two years in office. We made some calls and did some calculations and discovered that if we applied his definition of compassion to federal social servoices programs, we were actually spending about $20 million a year less on them than before he had taken office. That number never actually made it to the president. The question was deemed, "still in process of being accounted for."

Kuo adds a great coda to the episode: