Mayberry Machiavelli

Mayberry Machiavelli is a satirically pejorative phrase coined by John J. DiIulio Jr., Ph.D., a former George W. Bush administration staffer who ran the President's Faith-Based Initiative. After DiIulio resigned from his White House post in late 2001, journalist Ron Suskind quoted him in an Esquire magazine article describing the administration of the Bush White House as follows: "What you've got is everything--and I mean everything--being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis." DiIulio elaborated on "Mayberry Machiavellis" in a subsequent letter to Esquire, stating that in his experience Bush administration staffers almost always substituted political calculation in place of policy discussion.

The phrase is derisively meant to invoke infamous Machiavellian-style power politics coupled with a supposed sense of incompetent regional backwardness exemplified by a fictional rural town on Mayberry, R.F.D., and The Andy Griffith Show which ran on the American television network, CBS, from 1960 - 1971. One of the town's characters, deputy sheriff Barney Fife (played by Don Knotts) is the epitome of such ineptness.^{[citation needed]}