Comic Relief

What happens when a conservative pretends to have new ideas? Hilarity ensues. From Big Con friend Greg Anrig on Newt Gingrich's new book:

The man who spearheaded movement conservatism's ongoing era of governance, which continues to produce one debacle after another, is back pushing the same failed mind-set and ideas that he promises will lead to, as his book is titled, Real Change. But it has been the hostile attitude toward government espoused by Gingrich and the conservatives in power during the Bush years that has produced the conditions that the public now craves to escape from. Nonetheless, there it is on the best-seller list, along with Jonah Goldberg's comparably fanciful Liberal Fascism.

The central theme of Gingrich's book, just as it has been throughout his political career, is that "bureaucracy" predisposes government to fail, in contrast to an inherently more effective and efficient private sector. He writes, "In the world that works, if 70 to 90 percent of customers want something, they get it. In the world that fails, if 70 to 90 percent of the people want something, the bureaucracy continues to do what's best for itself, not for the majority of the American people." As an example, he ludicrously contrasts the ability of Federal Express and UPS to keep track of millions of packages with the government's inability to keep track of millions of illegal immigrants. The key to reform, says Gingrich, is to make government more entrepreneurial. "Moving from the world that fails to the world that works requires … moving from bureaucrats to entrepreneurs, from recipients to customers, and from no choice to real choice."

Perhaps the only virtue of Gingrich's affixing such glibness to the printed page is that it enables readers to draw circles around the contradictions and non sequiturs that permeate his thinking. So, for example, early on he emphasizes the importance of adhering to a relentlessly positive message and warning against the counterproductivity of "scorched-earth negativity" and "shrillness." But as the book proceeds, he rarely misses a chance to take shots at "the labor unions," "the trial lawyers," "the liberal lifestyle groups," "the Hollywood Left," "the antiwar Left," "the anti-religious Left," "arrogant unionized bureaucrats," and other groups he is unconcerned about offending.

More centrally, Gingrich's dichotomy between villainous government bureaucrats and virtuous "entrepreneurs" forces him to ignore or brush aside fairly obvious examples that undercut that hyper-simplistic worldview while leaving his arguments about governing lost in fantasy land. Take the subject of government contracting. Gingrich never adequately wrestles with any of the multitude of examples in which the Bush administration, equally hostile to government bureaucracy and civil servants, outsourced work to private, supposedly more entrepreneurial contractors -- with disastrous results. Under Bush, contract spending nearly doubled while the number of employees working for companies receiving government funding increased nearly 50 percent between 2002 and 2005, from $5.17 million to $7.64 million.

With even greater hilarity, this nonsense has made the New York Times bestseller list—but I can only imagine the waste of conservative movement resources it took to get it there. For the last few months I've been barraged with promotional materials from the various conservative mailing lists I'm on, often offering free or steeply discounted copies. It isn't costing them $4000 a second, like the Iraq War, to kite this nonsense, but it must be awful close. Money spent in order, well, to more efficiently lie:

Similarly, Gingrich writes that FEMA's "bureaucratic attitude and arrogance became a stunning indictment of the federal government in the weeks after Katrina." But as has been well documented, FEMA transformed during the 1990s into what both Democrats and Republicans hailed as a "model agency" under the leadership of James Lee Witt, who largely relied on harnessing the abilities and experience of the agency's career work force. FEMA was very much a government bureaucracy, but one that became far more effective at fulfilling its emergency response mission due to nothing more revolutionary than smart management. The agency's deterioriation under Bush, Joseph Allbaugh, and Michael Brown occurred primarily because they distrusted its career employees and followed the conservative game plan of politicizing, privatizing, devolving, and cutting – causing the professionals to leave in droves. The "bureaucrats" who knew what they were doing were pushed aside and out the door, exactly as Gingrich insists they should continue to be.

Views expressed on this page are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Campaign for America's Future or Institute for America's Future