ATLANTA, Jan. 31 -- A man who once lived and worked in a home for dying AIDS victims in Washington will be named by President Bush this morning to head the White House Office of Community and Faith-Based Initiatives. It is part of a bid to tie the office to Bush's new national service initiative and shift it from the controversy that greeted Bush's effort last year to aid religious charities.
The new director, Jim Towey, is a friend of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the president's brother. He worked on Capitol Hill and in Mother Teresa's ministry before becoming Florida's health and rehabilitative services director under Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles. Towey founded an advocacy group called Aging With Dignity in 1996.
Towey will succeed John J. DiIulio Jr., a blunt and feisty academic who was the office's first director but who resigned last fall. DiIulio, a Democrat, sparred with religious conservatives over the direction of the program, and the project became entangled in Congress over whether religious charities could discriminate in their hiring practices. The measure passed the House but stalled in the Senate, and Bush offered to drop the most controversial provisions.
Towey's lower profile fits with a White House plan to have the office under the wing of John Bridgeland, who was named Wednesday to head the newly created White House national service office. Bridgeland, a Bush domestic policy aide, had been closely involved in the faith-based initiative. The two efforts are to become increasingly integrated with more focus on volunteerism than on helping religious charities, administration officials said.
The changes come as Bush is assembling an effort to kindle national and community service in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. Like the original faith-based initiative, it retains a moral component but emphasizes the need for volunteerism.
"I view this as a unique moment not only to fight for freedom, a unique moment to fight for peace, but a unique moment to help change our culture from one that says, 'If it feels good do it,' to a new culture which says each of us are responsible for the decisions we make in life," Bush said today at a reception of supporters in downtown Atlanta, echoing one of his campaign themes.
The president briefly detoured into a notion of "corporate responsibility" alongside individual responsibility in a reference to the collapse of Enron Corp. "There's corporate responsibility, part of the responsibility here, which says that let's make sure when you account for losses and profits, that you put it all on your books so everybody understands," he said.
Later, at Booker T. Washington High School in Atlanta, Bush touted the Teach for America volunteer program in which young college graduates become teachers in troubled schools. "We can change," Bush told the students. "Use the evil to help usher in a period of personal responsibility. And part of an era of personal responsibility is to help somebody . . . help somebody in need."
At a firehouse in Daytona Beach, Fla., this morning, Bush watched a 9-year-old boy get fingerprinted and a group of senior citizens assemble "Individual Emergency Shelter Kits." He also examined exhibits of mounted patrols and radio monitoring -- all part of homeland defense volunteer projects. "We've got to make sure they happen all across the country," Bush said, crediting the government program Senior Corps, which he would expand from 500,000 participants to 600,000.
A Web site launched Wednesday morning to register people interested in volunteering through USA Freedom Corps, Bush's national service plan, received more than 450,000 visitors as of noon today, the White House said.