Mayberry Machiavelli is a satirically pejorative phrase coined by John J. DiIulio Jr.

John DiIulio

John J. Dilulio Jr. is a political scientist. He currently serves as the Frederic Fox Leadership Professor of Politics, Religion, and Civil Society and Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, he served as the first director of the White House Office of...

, Ph.D., a former George W. Bush

George W. Bush

George Walker Bush is an American politician who served as the 43rd President of the United States, from 2001 to 2009. Before that, he was the 46th Governor of Texas, having served from 1995 to 2000....

 administration staffer who ran the President's Faith-Based Initiative

White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives

The White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, formerly the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives is an office within the White House Office that is part of the Executive Office of the President of the United States.-Under George W. Bush:OFBCI was...

. After DiIulio resigned from his White House post in late 2001, journalist Ron Suskind

Ron Suskind

Ron Suskind is a Pulitzer Prize winning American journalist and best-selling author. He was the senior national affairs writer for The Wall Street Journal from 1993 to 2000 and has published the books A Hope in the Unseen, The Price of Loyalty, The One Percent Doctrine, The Way of the World and...

 quoted him in an Esquire

Esquire (magazine)

Esquire is a men's magazine, published in the U.S. by the Hearst Corporation. Founded in 1932, it flourished during the Great Depression under the guidance of founder and editor Arnold Gingrich.-History:...

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

Machiavellianism

Machiavellianism is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "the employment of cunning and duplicity in statecraft or in general conduct", deriving from the Italian Renaissance diplomat and writer Niccolò Machiavelli, who wrote Il Principe and other works...

 power politics coupled with a supposed sense of incompetent regional backwardness exemplified by a fictional rural town on Mayberry, R.F.D.

Mayberry

Mayberry is a fictional community in North Carolina that was the setting for two American television sitcoms, The Andy Griffith Show and Mayberry R.F.D. Mayberry was also the setting for a 1986 reunion television movie titled Return to Mayberry...

, and The Andy Griffith Show

The Andy Griffith Show

The Andy Griffith Show is an American sitcom first televised by CBS between October 3, 1960, and April 1, 1968. Andy Griffith portrays a widowed sheriff in the fictional small community of Mayberry, North Carolina...

which ran on the American television network, CBS, from 1960 - 1971. One of the town's characters, deputy sheriff Barney Fife

Barney Fife

Bernard "Barney" Fife is a fictional character in the American television program The Andy Griffith Show, portrayed by comic actor Don Knotts. Barney Fife is a deputy sheriff in the slow paced, sleepy southern community of Mayberry, North Carolina...

 (played by Don Knotts

Don Knotts

Jesse Donald "Don" Knotts was an American comedic actor best known for his portrayal of Barney Fife on the 1960s television sitcom The Andy Griffith Show, a role which earned him five Emmy Awards...

) is the epitome of such ineptness.