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.

Minnesota Independent: What did you come away thinking from the Republican extravaganza?

Thomas Frank: As usual, they had better parties than the Democrats.

MI: Any particular party that stood out?

TF: I’m not going to say anything more than that.

I’ve gone back to their speeches several times. Mitt Romney was particularly interesting to me. Carly Fiorina was interesting. Michele Bachmann.

MI: What did you think of Bachmann’s speech?

TF: She was talking about service. She strongly implied that assisting people who are in need is properly a function of the private sector, which is a very 19th century attitude. It’s a pre-1930s attitude. That’s what intrigues me about it. It was the kind of thing that you heard a long time ago, before there was a welfare state.

MI: What do you make of the Sarah Palin phenomenon? And what’s your sense of what kind of affect she’s having on this election?

TF: I’d never heard of her before. The Republicans chose well when they chose McCain, and I think McCain chose pretty well with her. Look what he got. He got a female, which is important for luring away the Hillary voters, or at least they think it’s important. I don’t know if that will actually work or not. He got someone who was not involved in scandal, and in fact is apparently a clean-government person. Although we know very little about her. It is funny how far down the hierarchy he had to go to find someone who’s not caught up in a scandal in some way. She appeased the right, the evangelicals and the other cadres of the right. And she’s a good speaker. Her speech was very good. He got a homerun there. The thing is I don’t think anybody knows anything about her. We could find out all sorts of things. I think he was willing to take that chance to have someone who was perfect in all these other ways. It’s got the culture wars going again, or it did until Monday.

MI: In your new book you write: “For a political faction to represent itself as a rebellion against a government for which it is itself responsible may strike you as a supremely cynical maneuver. If so, you are beginning to understand conservative Washington.” Is the McCain campaign, and his recent embrace of a movement for radical change in Washington, the most cynical permutation of this phenomenon yet?

TF: He has some credibility because for so long he was an enemy of Bush. But not much anymore. The example of this that really just made me guffaw with laughter was Mitt Romney. Did you see his speech at the convention? He was saying, Washington is liberal. Just totally in denial about everything — in denial that his party has even been in power, off and on, for the last 28 years. Washington is still liberal after all this! It’s extraordinary. It’s supremely cynical.

MI: And railing against east-coast elites.

TF: (Laughs) The Governor of Massachusetts!

MI: You describe a rather colorful cast of right-wing characters who have shaped Washington over the last three decades. Who among these guys emerged as your favorite?

TF: That would have to be Jack Abramoff. He’s had a fascinating career. In the book I don’t go into the things that he’s in jail for. I focus on his earlier career, which is fascinating to me. This guy is not just a corruptionist, but also was this great idealist, at least in his early years. And to all appearances remained that right up until the end. He claimed he was inventing a new kind of lobbying. What that apparently meant was this highly ideological brand of lobbying. He did work for South Africa, Jonas Savimbi, Ollie North. The guy is like this Where’s Waldo of conservative D.C. Wherever you’ve got something really awful going on he shows up. What’s funny is, through all this, he’s an idealist. He was a great leader of men. To hear his friends talk about him, he’s an inspiring guy. That is fascinating to me, that you can be both of these things at the same time.

MI: You moved to Washington in 2003. Why?

TF: My wife got a job there. But this came out of it. I couldn’t have written it anywhere else.

MI: You describe many horrible characteristics of the nation’s capitol. What do you like about living there?

TF: The flowers.

MI: That’s all?

TF: What do you want me to say? I like my neighbors. I like my family.

MI: You describe the New Deal era as a time when smart, idealistic young people flocked to Washington and created a regulatory framework that helped resurrect the economy after the Great Depression. We’re now facing what many are describing as a similar economic catastrophe. Do you see any signs that there is the motivation for a comparable response?

TF: We aren’t in that kind of state. You’ve got to remember they had higher than 30 percent unemployment. Right now it’s about six percent unemployment. So I don’t see anything like that on the horizon. If we’re anywhere close to that we’re at the very beginning stages of it. You’ve got to remember something about capitalism. It’s inherently unstable. It goes through crises all the time. It often looks like this is the end, and it never is. Just since I started writing about this stuff in the mid-1990s, how many stock market crashes have there been? Three I can think of. Probably more. One of those was catastrophic, when the NASDAQ collapsed in 2000. It lost 50 percent of its value. This was the first time I had really paid attention and seen the stock market crash while I was studying it and understood it. I thought this meant trouble for the wider economy, but what’s funny is the economy just kept chugging along. Despite how bad everything looks, with the financial sector just tearing itself apart right now, who knows what’s going to happen. It might bounce back and it might get much, much worse.

MI: We have the best climate for Democrats since at least Watergate, and yet we see Obama deadlocked with McCain in the presidential race. What do you attribute that to?

TF: The Democrats have a lot of problems. The power of money has drawn them to the right in the same way that it has drawn the Republicans to the right. The problem is that the Democrats now have a lot of trouble reaching out to and mobilizing their blue-collar base because they don’t want to offend the people who give money into politics. There’s two ways to do it as far as I can tell. One is the culture wars, and the other is economic liberalism. It’s hard for them to embrace or to advocate straight-forward economic liberalism anymore, because that pisses off the political donor class. But that’s what they need to do. Obama is starting to do it by the way.

MI: What evidence of that do you see?

TF: His acceptance speech at the Democratic convention. Before that he gave a lot of speeches talking about how great markets were, speeches that I would not have been surprised to hear coming from Ronald Reagan’s mouth. Of course Obama is a much better speaker and much smarter in every way. I really like Obama, and I hope he succeeds.

But the Republicans are what I’ve been looking at lately. It’s hilarious to watch them try to get out of the disaster on Wall Street that they have themselves created, to try to blame it on something else, or to try and spin their way out of it. It is truly hilarious.

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.

While unexpected in nearly all quarters, McCain’s choice was based on a cynical calculation that Palin would rally moribund social conservatives to the party flag. Indeed, to her supporters, Palin’s religion, family narrative and anti-liberal policy preferences are an essential part of her appeal. The social conservative base of the Republican party correctly reads Palin as a true believer, and their enthusiastic response, so far, has engorged McCain’s polling numbers in traditionally Republican hives while narrowing or eliminating Barack Obama’s advantage in swing states like New Mexico and Ohio.

Sarah Palin, in other words, has drawn the instantaneous and rapturous support of the very people who a mere four years ago steadfastly insisted that George W. Bush ranked among the most indispensable presidents in the history of republic. It is a remarkable feat that Sarah Palin has been transformed in the space of a few weeks into the second coming of George W. Bush, a man who would be creamed by most conceivable foes were he able to pursue a third term. Political scientists will spend careers figuring out how all of this became possible.

But Palin’s selection was also based on an apparently earnest — and thinly supported — argument that Sarah Palin represents a new kind of Republican who might reinforce McCain’s self-flattering “maverick” image. Here, Palin has been enlisted to help McCain court undecided voters and recover party defectors recoiling from the flagrant incompetence of the Bush administration and the “culture of corruption” that capsized the Republican party in the 2006 mid-term elections.

On its own merits, the narrative of Palin herself as a mini-maverick is implausible, a fact that only underscores how little most Americans know about Alaskan politics and how little the McCain campaign cared to investigate the governor’s own mythology before selecting her. All local and state politics have a ring of provincialism about them, and Sarah Palin has done nothing to break the mold. As mayor of Wasilla, she hired Steven Silver — a former Ted Stevens staffer and a federal lobbyist with ties to Jack Abramoff — to secure tens of millions in federal earmarks for her town.

When she ran for governor in 2006, she openly promised to favor her own borough, a commitment that she has effectively fulfilled in office by sparing her home region from the line-item vetoes that have disgruntled other areas of the state. During the last budget session, for example, Palin cut grants for more than three dozen youth sports facilities around Alaska. As it turns out, one of the budget items that survived was a $630,000 appropriation to the Wasilla Sports Complex, a facility whose construction and subsequent legal troubles Palin facilitated as the city’s mayor less than a decade ago. And throughout her first 18 months in office, the governor — a longtime advocate for moving the capital to south central Alaska — presided over the continuation of “capital creep,” a baleful process that has drawn government jobs away from Juneau and toward the Anchorage area.

In addition to her widely perceived regional biases, Palin has larded her administration with under-qualified friends from home, including a real estate agent and high school classmate whose professed love for cows helped land her a position as head of the state’s agriculture division. One supposes that if Sarah Palin were acquainted with someone with a background in Arabian horses, he or she would be heading the disaster planning section of the state’s Behavioral Health division.

The malignant inversion of this cronyism can be seen in the case of Walt Monegan, the public safety commissioner whose July firing has prompted a legislative investigation and has given Sarah Palin and John McCain to decry the entire interrogation as a partisan hit. After initially promising full cooperation with the investigation, Palin’s office has taken a Cheneyan turn in recent weeks — a comparison that is actually unfair to Dick Cheney, who has never promised “transparent and accountable government.”

Most surprising, however, has been the campaign’s straight-faced efforts to portray Palin as a rebellious fiscal conservative. Though she proposed reducing the operating budget by $150 million and lopped more than $200 million in spending via line-item veto, she has signed into law the two largest budgets in the state’s history. Even so, over the past two weeks, Palin’s self-aggrandizements as an “earmark reformer” have come under withering scrutiny. Everyone knows — though surprisingly few voters seem dismayed — that Palin has simply been lying about her position on the notorious Gravina Island Bridge to Nowhere, a project that the state of Alaska abandoned only when it became clear that federal money would not be forthcoming to pay for it.

Meantime, an even more expensive bridge project in the Anchorage region has been placed under review by the state for the same reasons. If Rep. Don Young and Sen. Ted Stevens had been able to secure the federal dollars that Gov. Sarah Palin hoped they could, a bridge even larger and twice as expensive as the Bridge to Nowhere would be under construction across Knik Arm, securing easier access to Anchorage from the Matanuska-Susitna Valley.

In a broader sense, the McCain campaign’s focus on Palin as an opponent of federal earmarks would be strange and irrelevant even if it were true. Aside from requesting earmark submissions (or not) from their congressional delegations, state governors have minimal influence on the federal budgeting process. State and local officials are, of course, perfectly welcome to reject federal dollars — and some have — but the taboo against passing up free money remains the norm.

Were Sarah Palin a genuine earmark maverick, she would be actively supporting the Democratic opponents of Don Young and Ted Stevens, who will otherwise be riding their governor’s coattails back to the trough in January. More significantly, though, it deserves mention that the McCain-Palin campaign has sought to reinvent itself as the ticket of change by focusing on a legislative practice that consumes no more than 1 percent to 2 percent of federal outlays and less than $30 billion per year — roughly the cost of seven weeks of war in Iraq.

One would think that in a country that’s committed itself to a $3 trillion dollar mistake in the Middle East, or a country enduring a historic credit meltdown, or a country that’s witnessed an “economic expansion” that’s actually made people poorer, a campaign predicated on the evils of pork-barrel spending, would either be ignored or driven angrily into the sea. That would, of course, mean that we lived in a country where the word “maverick” was more than a cheap marketing trick designed to separate fools from their votes.

David Noon is a professor of history at the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau, the author of the great, sort-of-on-hiatus Axis of Evel Knievel blog, and a contributor to Lawyers, Guns and Money.