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.