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Tavis: Thomas Frank is a bestselling author and editor of 'The Baffler,' a magazine of cultural criticism. His bestselling book is, "What's the Matter with Kansas, How Conservatives Won the Heart of America.' The book is now out in paperback, and he joins us tonight from Washington. Tom Frank, glad to have you on the program, sir.

Thomas Frank: It's my pleasure.

Tavis: Tell me about 'The Baffler' first, for those not familiar with that piece of work.

Frank: Okay, it's a journal of cultural criticism, and it's heavy on the essays. But the essays themselves are light and fluffy and very pleasant. (laughs) And they'll be in, yeah, there'll be a new one out about a month from now, I'd say.

Tavis: What's the cycle of publication on 'The Baffler?'

Frank: It's whenever we feel like it.

Tavis: (laughs) Somehow, I wish this TV show were like that, but that's not how PBS works. I have to come here every day. But sometimes, I wish that were the mantra around here. But anyway, let me start with the obvious question. What is the matter with Kansas? You just heard me say at the top of the show that over the last few weeks or so, three Republicans have switched to the Democratic Party in Kansas. Say it ain't so in a red state, Tom Frank.

Frank: (laughs) Well, it's a fascinating story, what's been going on there. But it should be a pretty familiar story. What's been going on there has been going on all over the country for the last 30 years. And by and large, the situation is not so - yes, you have these moderate Republicans these days who are going over to the Democratic Party and supporting Democratic candidates and that sort of thing.

But the larger story is for the last, not just in Kansas but all over the country, has been blue collar people, people who used to be Democrats going over to the Republican Party, and largely on the basis of sort of the culture war issues, the social issues. Now what you see in Kansas is this kind of extreme version of this case, where they're fighting within the Republican Party.

Where the conservatives will have the upper hand one year, and then the moderates will come back, and they'll have the upper hand. And right now, the conservatives are pretty much in the driver's seat in the Republican Party there. And their emphasis there is on things like, well, the abortion issue, naturally, but also things like, I was gonna say the evolution issue, but it's not really an issue in very many places.

But it is in Kansas. They fight like cats and dogs over that out there. And anyhow, the long and short of it is that the moderates these days are so annoyed by this that they are defecting, or some of them are defecting over to the Democratic Party. But this has been going on for a while.

Tavis: Talk to me about beyond the issues, at least two or three of them you've laid out now for us, that Republicans are fighting over. Beyond the issues, what does this mean, do you think, for the Republican Party nationally, that on these issues in a quintessentially red state, there is this Republican infighting? What does that mean? What are we to make of that?

Frank: Well, you see it everywhere, and you see it in the national Republican Party as well. Now, you think about there was a primary election here in Virginia just the other day for the Democratic Party where they chose a challenger to the sitting Republican Senator. And they chose a guy who was a former Republican. Actually was part of the Reagan administration.

This is something that is going on all over the country, where you have your sort of classic moderate Republicans, business Republicans, Republicans who tend to be professionals or members of the business class, white collar Republicans, saying I just don't feel comfortable going to a fundraiser and talking about how Charles Darwin was Satan, or something like that.

They don't feel comfortable with that. And they're defecting to the Democratic Party. And you saw a lot of this in the last election. But the thing that really, I don't mean to change the subject on you, Tavis, but in my opinion, the defection that is really making the difference and that continues to make the difference is blue collar people going over to the Republican Party.

Where you have a state like West Virginia in this last election, which has always been Democratic going back to Franklin Roosevelt, a hardcore working class place, voting for George W. Bush by a pretty healthy margin. Or I just read this in the newspaper the other day. Harlan County, Kentucky, which is almost synonymous with hard-fought labor battles, went for George W. Bush.

And certainly the most prominent defector from one party to another in the last go-around was Zell Miller, right? The Democrat from Georgia. Yeah.

Tavis: I hear the point you're making about, you're making the point that there are defections in both parties, and people are going in both directions, and maybe that speaks to the confused state of where we are (laughs) in politics in America.

Frank: Yeah, it certainly does.

Tavis: (laughs) I don't know. We'll come back to that in a second, perhaps. But I think the reason why the story, for me, at least, is more fascinating about Kansas is because as I read politics, certainly in my lifetime, Republicans are much more rabid, Republicans are much more, are not as decentralized in the way they run their party, in the way they come around on issues.

And now you've got people like Christie Todd Whitman, to your point, former New Jersey Governor, former Bush administration official, who's leading a whole effort on the part of moderate Republicans to say that this is not the kind of party I want to be in. But is that not, though, the kind of behavior, typically, that we associate with Democrats and not Republicans?

Frank: Yeah, it is. That's exactly right. And I'll give you a really striking example. Before I came over here, I looked on the website of the Johnson County Republican Party. This is the county that I grew up in. It's a very affluent suburb of Kansas City, it's in Kansas. And this is a place that has been Republican forever, right? And when I was a kid growing up there, my neighborhood went for Barry Goldwater by 70 percent.

I thought this was the most Republican, these were the most conservative people I would ever meet in my life. Well, those people today, that neighborhood today, those are the moderate Republicans. Those are the kind of corporate types. They like people like Christie Todd Whitman. They're Bob Dole Republicans. They're Nancy Kassebaum Republicans.

And if you look on the website of the Johnson County Republican Party now, it's been captured by the conservative faction of the party. There is a, you used the word rabid. (laughs) And I generally try to avoid words like that, but that's a very good term for what I found on the website. This denunciation of what they call RINOS. Republicans in name only.

Tavis: Right.

Frank: And they have this list of them, and a bunch of them are the kind of pillars of the Kansas Republican Party. People that when I was a kid, these were the leaders of the party. And now they're being denounced as traitors and turncoats and Trojan horses, and this kind of thing, and liberals. And they're being called liberals by the - the infighting is savage.

Tavis: There are a number of ways to read this, not the least of which is that this is much ado about nothing. It's one state, and we can't draw any national trends from that. That's one way to look at it. Or the other way to look at it is that this portends a pot of problems for the Republican Party about who is gonna control the soul of the party as we head into midterm elections and the Presidential race in 2008. On which side of that coin does Tom Frank?

Frank: (laughs) Oh. I honestly don't know the answer to that, because I'll tell you something. They tend to get together, for the Presidential election, they all come together and they vote for George W. Bush. And whatever else you say about this guy, Bush, I don't like him very much. I certainly didn't vote for him. But he has managed to keep these two factions together.

Both sides are angry at him, but they still (laughs) get together and vote for him at the end of the day. Now, on the local races, the Governor, we have a very good Governor in Kansas, she's a Democrat. But she's drawn the support of a lot of these moderate Republicans. We have a very good Congressman from where I come from, a heavily Republican area, but we have a Democratic Congressman right now, because so many of these moderate Republicans bolt the party and vote for this other guy.

Now, that's great, at a certain level, for people like me. I'm very liberal. I like to see that happen. I like to watch Republicans fight one another. But the larger problem, I think, is the cost that Democrats have to pay to draw these people in. Right? They don't come over to the Democratic Party because they've suddenly become liberals.

Tavis: Right.

Frank: They come over to the Democratic Party because in the nineties, the Democrats frankly jettisoned a lot of their traditional principles. And that's something that really troubles me. Now, I don't really fit in with anybody politically (laughs) in this country, but it is, yes. Look, things that happen in Kansas often go on to happen elsewhere in America.

It's often, instead of being the sort of heartland and the backwater and the last place where things happen, sometimes, in some ways, it's the first place where things happen. And it is a very Republican place. And to see the Republicans fighting like this in Kansas, yeah, the rest of the Republican Party should be very concerned about it.

Tavis: All right, in a minute and 15 seconds, let me hurl another issue at you relative to this that I see as a looming problem, and that is that, with all due respect, Democrats ain't been very good in the term of this administration, at taking advantage of the mistakes and now the infighting that's going on in the Republican Party. So at the end of the day, what does it mean if Democrats ain't smart enough or strategic enough (laughs) to take advantage of it?

Frank: Well, I'm not gonna disagree with you there. I think exactly the same thing, that they've really done very, very little. But they don't think they have to do anything, Right? They look at the President's approval ratings. He's, like, down there with Jimmy Carter at the tail end of Carter's presidency. It looks real bad. They don't think they have to do anything. They just have to sit back and reap the windfall.

Tavis: Right.

Frank: Of the Republican infighting. And the thing is that they're, like so many people in American politics and in American life, generally, they're lured by short-termism. Right? They think they're gonna win the next elections, and they're happy about that, and so they're not gonna do anything. But the problem with that is that they have to be planning for the long term.

They have to be thinking about where they're gonna be 20 years down the road. And this is why the Republicans have been so successful over the years, is 'cause they do that kind of long-term planning. But the Dems haven't done that.

Tavis: Maybe Howard Dean's listening to you tonight, I don't know.

Frank: I hope so. (laughs)

Tavis: The book by Thomas Frank, now out in paperback. 'New York Times' bestseller "What's the Matter with Kansas, How Conservatives Won the Heart of America.' Tom Frank, nice to have you on the program.

Frank: It's my pleasure.

Tavis: Up next, acclaimed young jazz lion, this great trumpeter named Christian Scott. Conversation and performance, stay with us.