John McCain, in defining his mission last night as reforming and reinventing government, said: "The wrong change looks not to the future but to the past for solutions that have failed us before and will surely fail us again....Like others before him, [Barack Obama] seems to think government is the answer to every problem; that government should take our resources and make our decisions for us." But it's precisely the hostility toward government that McCain expressed, under the leadership of his fellow conservatives, that caused government agencies to deteriorate and fail during the Bush administration. Restoring public confidence in FEMA, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Federal Aviation Administration and so on most definitely requires learning from past experience. And the lessons of the past are quite clear: public trust in those institutions was much higher when they were adequately funded and run largely by non-political professionals who actually enforced laws and regulations rather than sabotaged them. Because McCain is no maverick when it comes to the conservative movement's hostility toward regulations, civil servants, and funding for agencies that protect public health, safety, and the environment, and because his support comes from the same industry sources that have benefited from the dismantling of those agencies, there's no basis for believing that he would do anything to reverse their decline.

Just to take one example, back in the 1970s, the FDA ranked among the most respected of public agencies, with a public confidence rating of 80 percent. By 2000, that level had dropped to 61 percent; last year, it was just 36 percent. Why did that happen? Because conservatives, who have always been hostile to regulatory agencies, systematically worked to weaken the FDA extending back to the Reagan era. During Reagan's presidency, the FDA's staff declined by 30 percent. After a reprieve from 1988 to 1994, when more moderate presidents and a Democratic Congress provided ample boosts in the agency's budget and staffing, the assault on the FDA resumed when Newt Gingrich became House speaker in 1994. Gingrich pushed to privatize many of its activities, and from 1994 to 2007, the agency's appropriated personnel declined from 9,167 to 7,856, while its funding increased by only two-thirds of the amount that would have been needed to keep up with inflation. Under George W. Bush, the FDA, as with virtually all the other agencies responsible for policing industries, included top political appointees with close ties to those industries who systematically worked to defang them. Independent studies and journalistic reports have documented widespread FDA shortcomings and failures like the Melamine-tainted pet food and lead-laced Mattel toys, both imported from China.

As for FEMA, here's what I wrote in a piece for the Prospect Online this week:

The Bush administration took an agency that had been successfully reformed during the Clinton years and decimated it by following the right-wing game plan of politicizing, privatizing, devolving, and cutting. Anyone with a serious interest today in restoring the agency to its formerly effective condition would presumably want to pursue Clinton FEMA director James Lee Witt's earlier reforms, which amounted to the inverse of the conservative approach to government management: promoting highly experienced career professionals while sidelining political ideologues; accepting a leadership role at the federal level while drawing clear lines of responsibility with states; actively overseeing relationships with private contractors; and building on successful innovations. Are conservative reformers prepared to respect and take seriously the experience and expertise of civil servants? None as yet seem willing to do so, which would defy another of the signature principles of modern conservatism.

That kind of history is rather instructive in guiding how to successfully reform government and repair the damage caused by the conservative ideology that McCain embraces. Learning from the past used to be a central tenet of conservatism. But now John McCain is saying we should not look to the past but to the future. It's pretty easy to understand why he feels that way.