In the latest of a series of major personnel changes at the White House, President Bush has tapped as his new domestic policy adviser a conservative magazine editor with a pronounced aversion to Washington.

Karl Zinsmeister, 47, who is concluding a 12-year tenure as editor in chief of the American Enterprise, will begin work next month overseeing all of Mr. Bush’s key domestic initiatives.

“Karl has broad policy experience and a keen insight into many of the issues that face America’s families and entrepreneurs, including race, poverty, welfare, and education,” Mr. Bush said in a statement. “He is an innovative thinker and an accomplished executive. He will lead my domestic policy team with energy and a fresh perspective.”

Mr. Zinsmeister, who declined to be interviewed yesterday, is an unusual choice for a top White House job. While he has ties through the magazine to many leading intellectuals, his only government employment was a stint more than two decades ago as a legislative assistant to Senator Moynihan.

Mr. Zinsmeister edited the American Enterprise Institute’s magazine from upstate Cazenovia and was rarely seen at the conservative think tank’s offices in Washington.

In an e-mail to friends and colleagues yesterday, Mr. Zinsmeister signaled he will try to maintain an outsider’s perspective on Washington, even as he takes up his West Wing post. He said he and his family plan to live in Baltimore, some 40 miles away.

Mr. Zinsmeister said he and Mr. Bush formed a quick bond, leading to the job offer. “After hitting it off with him and his new staff, I have accepted,” the editor wrote.

The appointment is part of an ongoing revamp of Mr. Bush’s staff that has involved in recent months the appointment of a new chief of staff, Joshua Bolten, the installation of a new press secretary, Tony Snow, and the reassignment of the president’s top political adviser, Karl Rove.

“There’s new blood and it’s not just for show,” a conservative activist, Grover Norquist, said in an interview yesterday. He called Mr. Zinsmeister “an intellectual’s intellectual” and praised the White House for turning to a true outsider.

“It kind of argues against the assertion by some that all administrations tire and get petered out. They’re not, in this case, simply hiring the next deputy up. They’re not moving chairs around,” Mr. Norquist, the president of an antitax group, Americans for Tax Reform, said. “I think it’s great.”

Mr. Norquist said the hiring of Messrs. Snow and Zinsmeister signaled that they believe Mr. Bush is serious about pursuing an aggressive domestic agenda even as many in both parties dismiss him as a lame duck. “Tony would not have taken the job he took and Zinsmeister would not have taken this job unless, behind closed doors, they were not only told but convinced that the next two years will be exciting,” Mr. Norquist said.

Some of the recent staffing changes have been seen as aimed at assuaging complaints about the White House from lawmakers, journalists, and other Washington insiders. However, if Mr. Bush was seeking to smooth ruffled feathers in the capital, Mr. Zinsmeister would not appear to be the right choice.

In a 2004 interview with the Syracuse New Times, the future White House aide declared, “People in Washington are morally repugnant, cheating, shifty human beings. The mom who charters a bus for her kids to go to a rave is as bad as the lady with the crackpipe. We have sickness at the top and bottom of our society and we have a big middle, sensible with common sense and decency and morality.”

Just as with Mr. Snow, some of Mr. Zinsmeister’s writings could cause embarrassment to the White House. He has engaged in some mild criticism of Mr. Bush’s budget policies. In a recent issue of the American Enterprise, Mr. Zinsmeister wrote, “Though he talks a good line about battling government bloat, our current president has shown an eerie lackawanna when it comes to actually keeping a lid on the federal Pandora’s box.”

Mr. Zinsmeister has also written candidly on race, arguing that black communities have developed crippling problems that overlap in a way unseen in other parts of America. “The point of the conservative concern over black underclass life is that the pathologies run so much deeper there,” he wrote in 1996, citing his mentor Moynihan. “We desperately need to find out what it is in contemporary black culture that makes for these exceptional breakdowns.”

While Mr. Zinsmeister was hired to focus on domestic policy, in recent years he has devoted much of his time to reporting from Iraq. He has made several trips to the country and has argued forcefully that mainstream press outlets are understating the progress made by American forces there. He has written three books on the subject, “Boots on the Ground,” “Dawn Over Baghdad,” and “Combat Zone.”

Mr. Zinsmeister’s associates said yesterday that the job offer from the White House came quickly and without much warning. Friends said they did not know exactly how he came to the attention of Mr. Bush’s aides, but colleagues said the longtime magazine editor is friendly with a man who served until last month as head of the White House’s Office for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, James Towey.

It is unclear exactly what prompted Mr. Zinsmeister to leave his long-distance editing job, a move that was announced in March. A statement issued in April by the president of the American Enterprise Institute, Christopher DeMuth, said Mr. Zinsmeister “decided to relinquish his position.” Mr. DeMuth said yesterday through a spokeswoman that he and his colleagues were “thrilled” at the White House announcement.

In his e-mail to friends yesterday, Mr. Zinsmeister wrote, “I am an admirer of Cincinnatus, and had intended to return quietly to my writer’s plow after I completed my last issue of the American Enterprise. … The plow still shines for me, but at this delicate moment for our country it is time for me to serve.”