a Frank bulletin

When I posted about Tom Frank a while back (here), I remarked that Kansas didn’t really deal with electoral strategy per se. Well, Frank makes up for that deficit in the latest edition of the New York Review of Books. I don’t think he breaks any new ground in NYRB (and was Zell Miller’s conversion really much of a net gain for Bush?) but he can be forgiven for saying I told you so, because Kansas foreshadowed a lot of what happened in the ’04 presidential race.

Incidentally, Bernard Henri-Levy had an interesting take on Tom Frank (either summing Frank up or explaining him away) in an interview at the Atlantic Monthly’s website:

[Frank] wondered whether it was a surprise that so many Americans were ready to vote against their economic interests. To vote against one's economic interests means ideology—-means politics. It is the very definition of politics. If people voted only for their economic interests there would not be politics. What [Frank] was surprised by, and in a way discovered, is that America is becoming a place of strong political debate.