Jack Abramoff

Thomas Frank first gained acclaim as a founder of The Baffler, a witty, acerbic sporadically published business journal that took glee in mocking conventional economic wisdom. He became a household name with the publication of What’s the Matter With Kansas in 2004, which took his home state as a case study in how Republicans have capitalized on cultural issues such as abortion and gay marriage to convince lower- and middle-class residents to vote against their own economic interests. Frank’s latest provocation is The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, published last month. Its guiding thesis is that the current mess in Washington is not the product of inept politicians and bureaucrats, but rather an intentional dismantling of effective government by conservatives and their allies in the private sector. Frank was recently in St. Paul for the Republican National Convention. I spoke to him yesterday by phone from Raleigh, North Carolina, where he was slated to give a reading. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation.

If John McCain manages to carry the 2008 presidential election, his victory will be due in no small part to his success in persuading a passel of independent voters that Sarah Palin was chosen for some reason other than her appeal to the variety of conservatives who continue to dominate the Republican party. In Palin’s selection, in fact, we can observe the distilled absurdity of McCain’s “maverick” pretensions. While claiming to have selected a consummate “outsider,” he actually selected someone who’d been promoted by William Kristol, whom history will forever recall as the intellectual godfather of the Iraq War; Larry Kudlow, the bog-standard free marketeer who yodeled gleefully when McCain rescinded his (hopelessly mild) approval for cap and trade carbon emissions policy; and fundamentalist elites like Richard Land and Dan Coats, who have consistently served as vital theological supporters and enablers of the Bush administration from its first days to the Last Days.