Nothing Wrong With Kansas

Rahm Emanuel and Bruce Reed say Tom Frank's book isn't so useful:

Frank's book, an entertaining hatchet job on his home state of Kansas, attempts to tell the story of why many working- and middle-class Americans left the Democratic Party over the past 30 years. Kansas turns out not to be a very useful example, because the state hasn't elected a Democrat to the Senate since 1932.

But Frank explores the state and his own upper-middle-class suburb in an effort to discover why so many voters put cultural issues ahead of economic ones. In a chapter called "What's the Matter with America?" he declares, "People getting their fundamental interests wrong is what American political life is all about. This species of derangement is the bedrock of our civic order."

When the theory of Marxism doesn't conform to the real world,you've got Tom Frank.