Comments on Reading Tonight

Book punditry always seems especially odious in election years. The ideas they present always seem opportunistic, pointless, and guaranteed obsolete within 6 months (or, in some cases, 6 days).

Andrew Gelman, one of the premier statisticians of the day, has a book coming out soon that debunks a lot of Thomas Franks's book. Check it out.

The problem always was with those rural idiots, Paul. Still is.

On a side note, I'm beginning to lose sympathy for the many, many crosses you had to bear while working in retail.

The real problem with that book was that he never answered the question what is the matter with Kansas? That is, he never really came up with a good answer for why they vote the way they do. The entire book was sort of an exercise in bemused head shaking: What is up with these yahoos?

George Lakoff does a much better job of answering that question in his work, especially Don't Think of an Elephant.

A good review of Frank's book (and one that challenges his basic assumptions) is in the current New Yorker. Click here.

Paul, I understand being annoyed at the title, but 1)it's a specific historical reference to an article decrying the populist rebellion taking place in kansas 2)anyone who bothered to crack the book would find that Frank, a Kansan himself, has nothing but affection for the people of his home state.

exelizabeth: did you read the same book? I can tell you frank's thesis in a sentence: Kansans vote republican because a bogus class-encoded culture war narrative has displaced substantive discussion of economics, and this was enabled by the democrats moving away from their traditional platform of economic populism.

@6: That and the Civil Rights Act.