What's the real bottom line?

The heart of the book examines conservatives in power: "the leviathan of waste and misgovernment that is the glory of conservative Washington." I thought I knew a lot about how Republican rule worked. I knew that the man in charge of disaster preparedness at the Federal Emergency Management Agency turned out to be incompetent and unqualified. But I didn't know that appointing unqualified people to run federal agencies has been an announced principle of conservative government: Frank calls it "sarcastic staffing," and it shows its fullest flowering at the Department of Labor. I didn't know that the man appointed to oversee the Employment Standards Administration had previously written a report titled "How to Close Down the Department of Labor." I didn't know that the man in charge of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration had previously worked at "a union-busting law firm." I didn't know that the chief economist of the Labor Department was "not only a ferocious enemy of unions but an advocate of allowing entrepreneurial prison wardens to bring back convict labor" and that he now runs a 9/11 conspiracy website.

Conservatives don't want excellent people in government, Frank writes, because that would make government look good; it would make people like government. That principle was stated explicitly starting with the Reagan administration. Lyn Nofziger, Reagan's political affairs director, said in 1981, "we have told members of the Cabinet we expect them to help us place people who are competent. As far as I'm concerned, anyone who supported Reagan is competent."

The next step in conservative government is contracting out work -- the source of truly big money for corporations and the lobbyists who represent them. Government contractors today not only build submarines and fighter planes; they also collect income taxes and write budgets for federal agencies; at policy meetings about the Iraq war, contractors take the minutes. There are many more people working under government contracts than there are federal employees. And the real goal of federal employees who are conservative is to get out of government and into contracting -- or lobbying for contractors.

"The Wrecking Crew" also examines how conservative principles are regularly contradicted by conservative practices. Thus conservatives are anti-communist -- until Red China opens the gates to employing super-cheap labor. Conservatives are for the free market -- until they need a bailout for the mortgage industry. Conservatives are anti-government -- unless they can get no-bid contracts from the government.