Consumerist was anonymously sent a plain manilla envelope one day. Inside was an eighty-page booklet entitled AOL Member Retention Manual. The manual is the guide AOL sales reps use to try and lure you back in if you call up AOL and say that you want to cancel your service. There are a hundred thousand tactics located within the manual's pages, different ways of wearing a customer down to the point where it's easier just to agree to stay with AOL than try to cancel. (Via Boing Boing.)

Conservatives cannot govern

This according to an interesting paper by Alan Wolfe, who teaches political science at Boston College. Wolfe doesn't say that conservatives can't govern because they're incompetent; he says that they can't govern because they don't believe in government. At its heart, conservatism, says Wolfe, is the belief in tiny, tiny government. The problem is that (1) the United States is not an inherently conservative country ("In Europe, a conservative was someone who defended the traditions of the monarchy, justified the privileges of the nobility, and welcomed the intervention of a state-affiliated clergy into politics") and (2) whatever "conservatism" used to be, the G.W. Bush fellows are not conservative.

The paper is liberally biased and does contain some unjustified generalizations and questionable opinions, but its thesis is good: "Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are not likely to do it very well." This part of the paper is very good: Wolfe suggests that the Bush administration, which abhors government, has gone out of its way to fill high positions with people who will gut their own departments.

Joe Albaugh was the head of FEMA before Michael Brown, and Allbaugh's credentials to run the organization were that he was one of Bush's Texas gubernatorial aides. (By contrast, Clinton's FEMA director, James Lee Witt, wrote the book -- literally, the only college textbook -- on emergency management.) The problem with Allbaugh was that he was the head of an organization that he believed should never have existed, and consequently, instead of trying to make it better, he tried to make it worse:

[Allbaugh and Brown] did not fail merely out of ignorance and inexperience. Their ineptness, rather, was active rather than passive, the end result of a deliberate determination to prove that the federal government simply should not be in the business of disaster management. "Many are concerned that federal disaster assistance may have evolved into both an oversized entitlement program and a disincentive to state and local risk management," Allbaugh had testified before a Senate appropriations subcommittee in May, 2001. "Expectations of when the federal government should be involved and the degree of involvement may have ballooned beyond what is an appropriate level." There was the conservative dilemma in a nutshell: a man put in charge of a mission in which he did not believe.

Why, then, has government become so big? Wolfe's suggestion is that conservatives now understand that government is here to stay, and there's nothing they can do about it. Americans expect entitlement programs, federal assistance, and federal money. Wolfe says that conservatives have two reasons for wanting to be in government: "One is to prevent liberals from [using government to solve problems]; if government cannot be made to disappear, at least it can be prevented from doing any good. The other is to build a political machine in which business and the Republican Party can exchange mutual favors: business will lavish cash on politicians (called campaign contributions) while politicians will throw the money back at business (called public policy)."

Wolfe's paper is filled with such incendiary statements (the thrust of which is "liberals good, conservatives bad") that are either poorly justified or not justified at all. But he's got a good idea. Too bad it wasn't executed better.