The president is sending his inner guy on Africa to Sudan. This from a Scott McClellan press gaggle today:

The second item I want to mention is that the President is dispatching Mike Gerson, our Assistant for Policy, to Sudan to review the situation in Darfur and Southern Sudan, as well. He is going on the trip with Deputy Secretary Zoellick and some other NSC – some NSC and State Department officials, as well, will be on that trip. And part of what Deputy Secretary Zoellick said earlier this week is that he’s going there to review the situation in Darfur and also to see how the implementation of the comprehensive peace agreement is going in Southern Sudan, as well. And then from there, they’re scheduled to go on to Uganda, and this will give Mike an opportunity – Mike Gerson will have the opportunity to review the planning for the President’s malaria initiative in Uganda as well. So Mike Gerson will be going as part of this team. The President has asked him to go and then review the situation in those areas and then report back to him when he gets back.

P.S. on Gerson, from a Fred Barnes piece from earlier this year:

Bush has twice invited Bono to the Oval Office to discuss Africa. The first meeting, in 2002, was joined by several White House aides and Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the Catholic leader in Washington. Bono is a Catholic. The second, in 2003, involved only Bush, Bono, and Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s then national security adviser. Bono and Michael Gerson, the president’s counselor and speechwriter, have also struck up a friendship. They lunched together in Philadelphia in May, and Gerson and his wife Dawn attended the U2 concert there that evening. Bono dedicated a song to Gerson, who had never been to a rock concert before. “It was loud,” Gerson says.
The Bush-Bono relationship symbolizes the administration’s emphasis on aiding sub-Saharan Africa. “It’s fair to say the president views this as a major foreign policy focus,” a senior Bush aide says. So much so that Gerson spent nine days in early June in Namibia, Mozambique, and South Africa to investigate the effectiveness of the Bush effort. He found that what’s known at the White House as PEPFAR–the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief–is working well, with funds arriving ahead of schedule. But the Millennium Challenge Fund, which finances development projects in poor countries that are democratic and agree to encourage economic freedom, is not up to speed.

Sending Gerson strikes me as a sign that this is a top adminstration priority.