Mayberry Machiavelli

"Mayberry Machiavelli" is a satirically pejorative phrase coined by John J. DiIulio Jr., Ph.D., a former Bush administration staffer who ran President Bush's Faithbased Initiative. After he quickly resigned from his White House post in late 2001, DiIulio told journalist Ron Suskind, describing the administration of the Bush White House as published in Esquire: "What you've got is everything--and I mean everything--being run by the political arm. It's the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis."

The phrase is meant to invoke infamous Machiavellian style power politics coupled with a sense of incompetent regional backwardness as supposedly exemplified by the fictional rural town of Mayberry, R.F.D., from The Andy Griffith Show, which ran on the American television network, CBS, from 1960 - 1968.

The phrase, seeming felicitously apt, was picked up and repeated by many critics of the George W. Bush presidency.