Thomas Frank - The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Ruined Government, Enriched Themselves, and Beggared the Nation

Praise for The Wrecking Crew

Thomas Frank is back with another hunk of dynamite. The Wrecking Crew should monopolize political conversation this year. Its the first book to effectively tie the ruin and corruption of conservative governance to the conservative movement building of the 1970s, and, before that, the business crusade against good government going back at least to the 1890s.

Salon.com

Tom Frank has hold of something real. The Wrecking Crew can be good, spirited fun. Frank captures a quality of exuberant bullying in those of his conservative subjects he knows well enough to identify individually, rather than categorically.

The New Yorker

Compelling.

The Baltimore Sun

Franks new book is a more determined work of expos, in the muckraking tradition of Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell. Frank writes with the delighted outrage of an authentic satirist. The book repays reading just for its portrait of Abramoff.... Entertaining.

The New Republic

Readers entranced by the vivid prose and sweeping themes of Kansas wont be disappointed.

The American Prospect

Entertaining and engaging.

The Nation

Hard-hitting... Franks sentences inhale and unfurl with a wit and verve.

The New York Observer

Conservatives in office have made their share of blunders and mistakes, and Frank is at his finest in depicting some of the stunning instances of hypocrisy and idiocy in the period of Republican rule.

The New York Post

The Wrecking Crew eviscerates the cynical governing strategy that dominates market-based government. Frank does so with graceful prose and an acerbic, charmingly old-timey wit that reads like it was ripped from the notebook of a crusading 1930s muckraker.

In These Times

Smart, thoroughly researched, and written with wit and panache.

The Wichita Eagle

A welcome read. There is no doubt that Frank is helping to restore the journalistic and literary standards to political books. Elegant... The Wrecking Crew has the rhetorical power to illustrate the dire consequences of a government sold off piece by piece to the highest bidder. One finishes the book feeling as if ones political vision has been brought into focus.

The Courier-Journal

A superb follow-up to Whats the Matter with Kansas?... Thorough reporting and incisive historical analysis. With genuine outrage and blasts of polemic, but Frank never allows The Wrecking Crew to become just another seething right- or left-wing political tract preaching to the choir.

The Oregonian

THOMAS FRANK

How Conservatives Ruined Government,
Enriched Themselves, and Beggared the Nation

If we did any of these things alone the papers and the public could concentrate on it, get the facts, and fight. But we reasoned that if we poured them all out fast and furious, one, two, threeone after the otherthe papers couldnt handle them all and the public would be stunned andgive up. Too much.

We sat there, he amused, I as stunned as his public.

Well, you Pennsylvania politicians know something even Tammany doesnt know.

He nodded. Yes, he said. We know a lot they dont know. We know that public despair is possible and that that is good politics.

The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, 1931

Washington is the city where the scandals happen. Every American knows this, but we also believe, if only vaguely, that the really monumental scandals are a thing of the past; that the golden age of misgovernment-for-profit ended with the cavalry charge and the robber barons, at about the same time presidents stopped wearing beards.

I moved to Washington in 2003, just in time for the comeback, for the hundred-year flood. At first it was only a trickle in the basement, a little stream released accidentally by President George W. Bushs friends at Enron. Before long, though, the levees were failing all over town, and the city was inundated with a muddy torrent of graft.

How are we to dissect a deluge like this one? We might begin by categorizing the earmarks handed out in those days by Congress, sorting the foolish earmarks from the costly earmarks from the earmarks made strictly on a cash basis. We could try a similar approach to the Bush administrations contracting practices: the no-bid contracts, the no-oversight contracts, the no-experience contracts, the contracts handed out to friends of the vice president. We might consider the shoplifting career of one of Dubyas former domestic policy advisers or the habitual plagiarism of the presidents liaison to the Christian right. And we would certainly have to find some way to parse the extraordinary incompetence of the executive branch, incompetence so fulsome and steady and reliable that at some point in those years Americans stopped being surprised and began simply to count on it, to think of incompetence as the way government works.

But the onrushing flow swamped all taxonomies. Mass firing of federal prosecutors; bribing of newspaper columnists; pallets of shrinkwrapped cash misplaced in Iraq; inexperienced kids running the Baghdad stock exchange; the discovery that many of Alaskas leading politicians were on the takeour heads spun. We climbed to the rooftops, but we could not find the heights of irony from which we might laugh off the blend of thug and pharisee that was Tom DeLayor dispel the nauseating suspicion, quickly becoming a certainty, that the government of our nation deliberately fibbed us into a pointless, catastrophic war.

So let us begin on the solid ground of basic historical fact: this spectacular episode of misrule coincided with the political triumph of the right. Other times and other lands have seen misgovernment by other political persuasions, of course, but if we wish to understand the specific dynamics of the period just ended we must look to American conservatism, and in particular to that movements ideas about the state.

We must also look to Washington itself. During the era that is our subject here, the capital region became one of the wealthiest metropolitan areas in America. Through this enchanted city, the gentlemen of the right rolled like lords of creation. Every spigot was open, and every indulgence slopped out for their gleeful wallowing. All the clichs roared at full, unembarrassed volume: the wines gurgled, the T-bones roasted, the golf courses beckoned, the Learjets zoomed, the contractors glass buildings sprouted from the earth, and the lobbyists mansions grew like brick-colonial mushrooms on the hills of northern Virginia.

Democrats, for their part, tried to explain the flood of misgovernment as part of a culture of corruption, a phrase at once obviously true and yet so amorphous as to be quite worthless. Republicans have an even simpler answer: government failed, they tell us, because it is the nature of government enterprises to fail. As for the great corruption cases of those years, they cluck, each was merely a one-of-a-kind moral lapse unconnected to any particular ideologyan individual bad apple with no effect on the larger barrel.

Which leaves us to marvel helplessly at what appears to have been a spectacular run of lousy luck. My, what a lot of bad apples they were growing back then!