Environmental Scorecard

No issue better reflects the growing chasm between America’s two political parties than that of the environment, which was born in the Republican Party and was once a broadly bipartisan issue. The 1972 Clean Water Act, for example, passed the Senate, 86-0, and the House, 366-11 – and then easily overrode Richard Nixon’s veto, 57-12 and 247-23. But the League of Conservation Voters’ latest National Environmental Scorecard tells a completely different story, particularly in the House of Representatives, where most Democrats score above 90%, most Republicans below 10%. Among the leadership the difference is even starker – with Democrats at 92% and Republicans at 2%. And there’s a nice consistency among the declared presidential candidates: Cruz 0%; Paul 0%; Rubio 0%. The partisan differences are escalating for two reasons: (1) most Republicans’ current scores are significantly lower than their lifetime averages (Oregon’s Greg Walden has dropped from 11% to 3%, for example, and Virginia’s Frank Wolf from 26% to 6%); and (2) the tea party wing is pushing the GOP deeper into anti-environmental territory. Many House votes now attempt to roll back existing protections – keeping pesticides out of our waterways, for example, and carbon pollutants out of the air. Others seek to prevent the Defense Department from replacing fossil fuels with biofuels and the EPA from using peer-reviewed scientific studies with confidential health information.

This creates a dilemma for the League, as it tries to maintain a semblance of non-partisanship, something it has traditionally done by supporting Republicans with mediocre records – like Maine’s Susan Collins (55%) – over pro-environment Democrats. Such Republicans are ever harder to find.

Jebillary

“The idea of hereditary legislators is as inconsistent as that of hereditary judges, or hereditary juries; and as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man; and as ridiculous as an hereditary poet-laureate.” Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man As disheartening as an hereditary president.

Hillary Clinton declared her candidacy five days ago, 19 months before the polls open. She has been on the front page of the New York Times ever since – even though she faces no opposition and her campaign to date has consisted of driving to Iowa, having coffee with people, and going unrecognized in a Chipotle restaurant. For this she garnered such headlines as: “The Hillary Clinton Reboot: Both Off the Cuff and Meticulously Planned;” “Another Clinton Now Vows to Fix Political Finance System;” “For a Clinton, It’s Not Hard to Be Humble in an Effort to Regain Power.” Nineteen months of this?

Meanwhile, Jeb Bush, who hasn’t even announced yet, is roaming the country picking off big donors so effectively that he quickly pushed Mitt Romney from the race.

Publicly, Jeb and Hillary are distancing themselves from heredity and inevitability, and they do have impressive resumes. But in an election projected to cost $5 billion, it’s what happens in private that counts. These are the safe candidates behind those doors, the representatives of the old order, security blankets for the establishment. Look around, they say, you could do worse. We certainly could. The question is, can we do better?

Teddy Gets Randy

Even though it feels like hordes of Republicans are running for president (and but a single Democrat), in fact last week Rand Paul became only the second declared GOP candidate. So for now, with just 16 months to go, he and Ted Cruz stand alone in what will soon be a crowded field. Both Paul and Cruz appeal to the tea party base, but the similarities seem to end there. From my perspective, Ted Cruz presents the most unpleasant face of the Republican party – obstructionist, narrow-minded and mean – whereas Rand Paul represents its most interesting faction. An anti-war iconoclast whom Lindsey Graham called “to the left of Barack Obama” on foreign policy, he thinks the government should stay out of our private lives, opposes lobbyists, pork and the Patriot Act, and actively courts minorities and young people. For this child of the 1960s, I thought, here is a breath of fresh air.

Then I looked a little deeper: Paul advocates U.S. withdrawal from the United Nations and calls Obamacare “unconstitutional” despite the Supreme Court's ruling otherwise. While he accepts donations in bitcoins, he has flirted with a return to the gold standard. He believes climate change is caused by humans but opposes regulating carbon emissions and loathes the EPA. He has linked vaccinations and autism, opposes all gun restrictions, abortion funding, same-sex marriage, the separation of church and state, and the Federal Reserve.

The deeper I look, the more Rand Paul morphs into Ted Cruz.

“Hoosier Hospitality”

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” “What was intended as a message of inclusion . . . was interpreted as a message of exclusion,” said House Speaker Brian Bosma of Indiana’s misbegotten religious freedom law. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”

Who is kidding whom? What other reason was there to pass a law that fixes a problem that doesn’t exist? How exactly are Christians discriminated against in Indiana? It seems to me they run the place. The original bill said precisely what its drafters meant it to say – which was, Garrett Epps noted in The Atlantic, that for-profit businesses (1) have the same religious rights as individuals and churches and (2) are legally protected against private discrimination suits. When Democrats proposed an amendment clarifying that the bill did not permit discrimination, Epps wrote, the majority voted it down.

Then the commercial backlash set in, and everybody backpedaled, blaming language for obscuring their noble intentions and rushing to clarify their own carefully chosen words. Now the lawmakers are congratulating themselves for passing a law that neither condemns nor condones discrimination. Well done, Indiana.

Of course, not everyone’s pleased. “Homosexual Zealots to Christians in Indiana: Back to the Plantation” blares the American Family Association’s website.

Meanwhile, Indiana just convicted a woman from a conservative Hindu family for botching her own abortion and then seeking medical help. The charge was “feticide;” the sentence 20 years.

Mitch McConnell’s War on Air

Sometimes I wonder whether Mitch McConnell used to ask Santa to put a lump of coal in his stocking. He certainly does love the stuff and those who sell it. (They don’t “produce” it; the earth does that.) And while the rest of the world is trying to reduce its dependence on coal, the Majority Leader is on a single-minded crusade to ensure we keep burning as much as we can. It's good for us. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, an average-sized coal plant annually discharges: 3.7 million tons of carbon dioxide (the equivalent of chopping down 161 million trees); 10,000 tons of sulfur dioxide; 10,200 tons of nitrogen oxides (equal to 500,000 new cars); hundreds of pounds of mercury, arsenic, lead; and on and on.

Last week McConnell wrote all 50 governors, urging them to simply ignore the administration’s regulations aimed at a 30% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030, adding that “the real danger [is] allowing the EPA to wrest control of a state’s energy policy.” This is part of a political and legal counterattack on President Obama’s “war on coal,” and it's not to be taken lightly. Laurence Tribe, Obama’s Harvard Law School mentor, testified that the EPA’s “energy” plan amounted to “burning the Constitution,” an issue likely to appeal to five Supreme Court justices I could name.

But EPA stands for Environmental Protection, not Energy Production, and as the Nixon administration learned 45 years ago, it requires a national effort to safeguard our air and water. We need one now.

Divide and Rule

“Right-wing rule is in danger,” Bibi Netanyahu thundered in a video appeal just before the Israeli elections. “Arab voters are streaming in huge quantities to the polling stations.” Some found this offensive. “No other Western leader would dare utter such a racist remark,” tweeted an opposition leader. “Imagine a warning that starts, ‘Our rule is in danger, black voters are streaming in quantity to the polling stations.’”

Imagine. In America? It’s so 1960s Alabama. Instead, we have tried much subtler ways to suppress turnout, such as gerrymandering, long waits at polling places and voter identification laws. Remember when the Pennsylvania legislature passed a series of conservative bills in early 2012? “Pro-Second Amendment? The Castle Doctrine, it's done,” boasted House Majority Leader Mike Turzai. "First pro-life legislation – abortion facility regulations – in 22 years, done. Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done." (For the record, Obama carried Pennsylvania by 5 percentage points. Nationally, non-white voters, who overwhelmingly supported Obama, grew by 4.6 million in 2008 and another 3.6 million in 2012.)

It’s arguable, then, that voter-suppression efforts haven’t worked very well. But the problem is that they, often intentionally, polarize voters along racial and ethnic lines. Netanyahu has vowed never to accept a Palestinian state and to continue building settlements in Palestinian areas. In America we increasingly look at issues, from policing to education to welfare, through the lens of race.

If we talk only to ourselves, instead of to each other, how will we find a common language?

Bananas

And we thought all the wackos were in the House. The completely bizarre “Open Letter to the Leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” dated March 9^th and signed by 47 Republican senators, should put that quaint notion to rest. The letter seeks to undermine ongoing nuclear negotiations by helping Iran’s unnamed leaders understand the American constitutional system, including the length and limits of presidential and senatorial terms. Such as: “Applied today, for instance, President Obama will leave office in January 2017, while most of us will remain in office well beyond then – perhaps decades,” a truly terrifying thought. The condescending letter reads like a misguided middle-school social studies assignment. (“Write a letter to the leaders of a foreign country describing our system of government.”) Never mind that it describes our system incorrectly or that the senators' knowledge of Iran apparently doesn’t include who should actually get their letter. Bibi Netanyahu told them all they needed to know about the ayatollahs just last week.

In related news, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, wrote an op-ed piece in the Lexington Herald-Leader urging states to refuse to implement federal environmental regulations, which only goes to show that the Iranians aren't the only political leaders who don't understand our Constitutional separation of powers.

All their extracurricular writing assignments and lawsuits have left our legislators very little time to pass actual laws. But fear not, no matter how dysfunctional our government may seem, we still import bananas, so we aren't a “banana republic” yet.

Big Corn

Only 610 days left until Election Day, and the pace is heating furiously in Iowa, whose caucuses are supposed to foretell the political fortunes of presidential aspirants and unlock the wallets of big donors – all to send 1% of the delegates to the national conventions. The 2016 campaign kicked off last week when a very rich “agribusinessman” named Bruce Rastetter summoned Republican candidates to Des Moines to talk about the Renewable Fuels Standards, an issues that barely registers on the GOP’s national radar but is a multi-billion dollar industry in Iowa. It’s also an example of how efforts to cut fossil-fuel emissions are hijacked by big business, given huge bi-partisan government subsidies (see, we can work together!), turn into perversions of their environmental intentions – and caused Republican hopefuls to tap dance around their core beliefs (market-based solutions, small government, and fossil fuels as the salvation of America).

Why just last week, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, speaking on behalf of Big Coal, called on states to simply reject “so-called ‘clean-power’ regulations [that seek] to shut down more of America's power generation under the guise of protecting the climate.”

But out in Iowa they were singing a different tune, talking about the great benefits of planting the state from Davenport to Sioux City in one vast monoculture of subsidized corn. Only Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz demurred. But before we heap praise on Cruz for not “pandering,” it’s worth noting that in Texas Big Corn takes a back seat to Big Oil.

L’Etat? C’etait Moi!

Or as Hillary might have put it: “What do you mean I had to have a government-issue email address like some common bureaucrat? I was State!” And so we learn that Hillary Clinton didn’t use her government email account during her entire tenure as secretary of state. This week her lawyers handed over 50,000 pages of her personal emails, generously suggesting, The New York Times reported, they were “motivated by efforts to update the department’s record management system.”

According to news reports, access to clintonemail.com – which was headquartered, not at Foggy Bottom, but in Chappaqua, NY – was a sought-after status symbol. One person who had such access was Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s long-time confidante and protégée. Abedin was a part-time advisor to the Secretary of State, while holding – but not necessarily reporting – three other paid consulting gigs: The Clinton Foundation; personal assistant to Hillary Clinton; and Teneo Holdings, a powerful “global advisory firm” with close ties to, um, the Clintons.

We are “not a lobbying firm,” Teneo explains on its website. “However, our experience helps us understand how decisions are made that affect our clients’ businesses. In the US, we use our deep relationships to provide strategic counsel and help clients navigate policy debates in Washington and state capitals as they look to find support, amplification and clarity around the issues that they care about.”

In other words, we’re a lobbying firm.

Ah, language: "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is.”

One Week

We live obliviously in a dangerous world, a world where Putin appropriates territory as he pleases and his critics are murdered in the public square, where China smothers dissent and rattles its sabers, where ISIS – and its even more brutal disciples in Nigeria – have made slavery and beheadings instruments of dogma and recruitment. North Korea launched a couple of missiles yesterday, and Israel seems bent on instituting a policy of apartheid. And what do we do in the face of these challenges? On Friday, after the pettiest of brinksmanship, Congress extended funding for homeland security for one week. One week. And they had to go to zero hour to accomplish even that. Not that anybody particularly noticed. Sure, the press played up the melodrama leading up to the vote, although with far less ink than it gave the Oscars. When the vote was over and homeland security had been funded for seven whole days, the media returned to covering the 2016 presidential horse race as if that were the most immediate issue we faced.

This is America the exceptional, the nation that seeks to export our form of government to the rest of the world because it is so much better than everyone else’s. We can’t even govern ourselves. We have elected a Congress that has substituted grandstanding for governing and equates the empty gesture with “standing on principle.” For more proof, tune in tomorrow when Benjamin Netanyahu comes before Congress to insult the president of the United States.

Quotes of the Week

Which of the following statements did Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore not make?

• “If these young, hot little girls on campus have a firearm, I wonder how many men will want to assault them. The sexual assaults . . . would go down once these sexual predators get a bullet in their head.”
• “He doesn’t love you. He doesn’t love me.”
• “I am one-hundred percent in compliance with IRS - period."
• “If you have cancer, which I believe is a fungus . . .

The correct answer, of course, is (b), which is taken from Rudy Giuliani’s supposedly off-the-cuff and off-the-record remarks to a group of political donors at New York’s 21 Club. Rudy opened with, “I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the president loves America.”

My first reaction was that Giuliani had become demented in his never-ending search for the spotlight, but I underestimated the ambitions of the man. A YouGov poll conducted after he spoke found that only 47% of Americans think Obama “loves America,” a number that obscures the huge partisan divide: 69% of Republicans don’t think Obama loves America, three-quarters question his patriotism, and 88% view him unfavorably. These numbers, as Rudy well knows, encourage partisan attack rather than political compromise.

The other three quotes belong to Fiore, who owns a home health-care business and was just removed as legislative majority leader and chair of the Taxation Committee for having more than a million dollars in, um, tax liens.

The Botox Dilemma

Congress has now voted 67 times to repeal Obamacare, which, while pleasing to people with nothing better to do, is clearly going nowhere. Meanwhile, King v Burwell is scheduled for oral argument before the Supreme Court next week. This frivolous case could accomplish what Congress can’t – overthrowing the Affordable Care Act. King is the case with the ludicrous cast of plaintiffs that the Federal Court of Appeals in Virginia unanimously threw out last June. “You are asking us to kick millions of Americans off health insurance,” Judge Andre Davis asked incredulously, “just to save four people a few dollars?” But four Supreme Court justices apparently found that reasonable and agreed to hear the appeal. It will take only one vote more to overturn the law.

The U.S. has been spending far more on health care than any other country since way before Obamacare, and Americans are no healthier for it. One clue to this enigma might be a full-page ad in Saturday’s New York Times, which featured 16 of the “Top Doctors in the nation," whose specialties range from: CoolSculpting to Abdominoplasty, from Nose Reshaping to Buttock Augmentation.

I’m not suggesting people shouldn’t have these procedures – in this short life, if we can feel better about ourselves, I say, go for it. But what does it say about our national health priorities when there is a full-Supreme-Court press to throw 6 million predominantly poor people off the health-care rolls, while 16 doctors are buying a $104,000 newspaper ad to tout their services?

Scientific Republicans

What is it about the Republican base and science? They seem to have such a toxic relationship. The latest example is the 2016 presidential hopefuls’ tap dance around measles vaccinations, which climaxed with Rand Paul’s proclamation: “The state doesn’t own your children. Parents own the children.” Apparently, property rights die hard on the GOP's right wing.

The history of reflexive opposition to scientific data contains a dose of religious fundamentalism, mixed with anti-regulatory and anti-intellectual fervor, and a splash of paranoia, all wrapped in a conspiracy theory.

We’ve seen it in climate change, where Rick Perry castigates “scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects.”

We’ve seen it in evolution, which Georgia’s Paul Broun labels "lies straight from the Pit of Hell,” adding, for emphasis, that "Earth is about 9,000 years old” and “was created in six days as we know them." Reassuringly, Broun served on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

We’ve even seen it lately in restaurant hygiene, where North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis improbably singled out requiring employees to wash their hands after using the toilet as an illustration of government over-regulation. “I don’t have any problem with Starbucks if they choose to opt out of this policy,” Tillis added, “as long as they post a sign that says, ‘We don’t require our employees to wash their hands after leaving the restroom.'" Brilliant, but somehow the original regulation seemed simpler.

I cannot wait for the primary season to begin.

The Great Hoax

I believe that almost everyone who runs a large organization is taking steps to cope with the threats posed to that organization by climate change. I believe that the leaders of countries from China to the U.S. to Europe, the governors of most states and the mayors of large cities, and the CEOs of major corporations are drawing up contingency plans – just in case the beliefs of 97 percent of the scientific community and the ever-more-sophisticated climatology models turn out to be true. I believe this includes ExxonMobil and other energy conglomerates, despite what their lobbyists are peddling. They would be fools not to. The exceptions are governors of energy-dependent states, Millennialists of all persuasions who can’t wait to get to paradise – and the Republicans who control both houses of Congress and who have made denial a litmus test of political orthodoxy, like the tax pledge, intelligent design and abortion. But members of Congress don’t run anything, and they are responsible for the future of no organization other than their reelection campaigns.

Although most Republicans actually believe climate change is real, the number of their Congressional representatives who publicly say so is shrinking. This is not based on new evidence, of which there is none, but on politics. “I think it's part of the phenomenon of the polarization of the Congress,” said former GOP Congressman Jim Greenwood.

And so while responsible people make plans, just in case, those responsible for our “general welfare” stick their heads in the sands.

Correction: A typo in Friday’s post listed Charlie Hebdo’s normal circulation as 6,000 copies. It is 60,000.

Christmas Shopping

I was hoping to give my kids a Congressperson for Christmas this year, but when I finally went online there were hardly any left. Just a couple of lame duck representatives and Mary Landrieu, still peddling her Keystone Pipeline. But I’m looking for someone who will last beyond the end of the year. Damn those pre-Christmas sales, especially the $1.1-trillion pre-Christmas budget sale that has a little something for everyone: sleep-impaired, Red Bull-guzzling truckers can again legally drive 82 hours a week – putting even Santa’s sleigh at risk; medical marijuana dispensaries, in states where they’re lawful, are safe from raids by the Justice Department, which can now only bust illegal joints; and in a major surprise, the sage grouse, never a large donor, lost out to the oil-and-gas industry, which claims the endangered bird interferes with drilling.

But the really big gifts went to the really big givers.

Those risky derivatives that brought the world’s economy to its knees in 2008 will again be insured by the American taxpayer for the sole benefit of the five banks – Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan – that do 95% of the trading.

And big donors can now give $1.6 million to their favorite parties – over eight times the old limit.

The New York Times reports that Estefanía Isaías can spend Christmas in Miami with her maids, thanks to her fugitive family’s enormous generosity to the Democratic Party.

And Mitch McConnell hopes we all get coal in our stockings.

One More Nail

There is a small organization in southeastern Pennsylvania that has devoted its entire 47-year existence to studying fresh water, becoming perhaps the most respected scientific institution in a field critical to us all. Recently, the Environmental Protection Agency asked the Stroud Water Research Center’s scientists to help clarify the Clean Water Act’s “Definition of the Waters of the United States” to ensure their continued protection. Here is the clarification: “The scientific literature clearly demonstrates that streams, regardless of their size or how frequently they flow, strongly influence how downstream waters function. Streams supply most of the water in rivers, transport sediment and organic matter, provide habitat for many species, and take up or change nutrients that could otherwise impair downstream waters.”

This sentence is enormously important and little understood. It says that small, and even intermittent, streams are the source of most clean water and their protection is critical to the entire system. Small streams supply larger rivers with up to 70% of their flow, provide food and habitat for humans and other species, and filter pollutants out of the water itself. The economic benefit of these services is almost incalculable.

So what’s the problem? Well, these are the streams that coal companies blow off mountaintops, that loggers dry up when they clear cut, that frackers contaminate in pursuit of gas, that developers fill in. These are powerful forces, for whom science is just another gun to hire and this careful, comprehensive study just one more nail in EPA’s coffin.

Wake Me, I’m Dreaming

Thinking about the upcoming 114^th Congress has given me some strange dreams. • I dreamt that Utah Senator Mike Lee sponsored a retroactive amendment to the Defense of Marriage Act, exempting Mormon founder Joseph Smith from the provision that “the word 'marriage' means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife.” This followed the church’s recent revelation that Smith had 40 wives, some of whom were already married to his close friends.

• Then there was Senate Bill 2 (SB1, of course, repeals Obamacare). Known as the “One-Man’s-Trash-is-Another-Man’s-Treasure” bill, #2 removes all “Leave No Trace” signs from federal lands, whose presence, said a sponsor, “impeded natural views” and were "a tremendous waste” of taxpayers’ money. “The government has no business legislating personal behavior outside of sex and marriage,” he said, adding that the bill will enable private carting companies to “create thousands of good jobs,” getting people off welfare and “out into a healthy environment” – a much more effective environmental policy than the burdensome restrictions imposed by the recently abolished EPA.

• The weirdest dream of all was that, with oil prices at a four-year low, gas production booming, and the U.N. having issued its most comprehensive report yet on the threats from climate change, the centerpiece of the new senate majority’s 21^st-century energy plan is, um, coal.

“Thirty years ago," wrote the Union of Concerned Scientists, "coal was seen as a fuel of the past.” That's when I realized I wasn’t dreaming any more.

Election Reflection

If politics is a game – and that’s how the media mostly reports it – then last Tuesday was a whoopin’ for my team. (But, hey, I’m used to it: my high school football team was 1-6, and before the season we thought we might go undefeated. Then we actually had to play someone.) All the post-election post-mortems, the gloating and whining, the excuses and accusations, can’t obscure a simple fact: we lost. It happens. But what if politics is more than a game? What if you believe that some issues are too important to simply say, “well, we lost that one.”

Only days before the election, the UN published its most dire warning ever on climate change. Don’t tell James Inhofe, the next chair of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. Citing “the nation’s top climate scientists” – not one of whom actually agrees with him – he calls global warming "the second-largest hoax ever played on the American people, after the separation of church and state.” On issue after issue – from infrastructure investment to reproductive choice, from urban revitalization to wilderness protection, from universal health care to universal suffrage – I see a Congressional majority completely out of step with me.

Well, tough luck for me. I don’t get to choose a benevolent despot to give me the government I want. That’s why we have elections. And we'll have more. I may have been 1-6 in high school, but I’m not leaving this field just yet.

Mean Streets

Thomas Menino, Boston’s first Italian-American and longest-serving mayor, died last week. “My No. 1 thing,” he said in an interview two years ago, “is bringing racial harmony to the city.” Boston was in the second year of court-ordered busing to desegregate its schools when we moved there in the fall of 1975. Each morning we watched a caravan of yellow buses, filled with black school kids and escorted by police on motorcycles, wind through streets packed with jeering white people and climb to the top of Bunker Hill, where police sharpshooters waited on the roof of Charlestown High School.

For almost a century, Charlestown had been one of Boston’s poorest, toughest and least diverse neighborhoods, almost 100% white and overwhelmingly Irish-American. Its decrepit public-housing project below the Tobin Bridge exhibited the same pathologies – high crime, single mothers, school dropouts – which Daniel Moynihan had ascribed to the black ghetto.

It was a tense time in Boston, where politics was dominated by an uneasy alliance of Irish- and Italian-Americans who pandered to the city’s long history of ethnic hatreds and fortress neighborhoods. Menino, who lived his entire life just blocks from his birth, knew firsthand that Boston’s neighborhoods are also its strength – and instead of using his own heritage as a wall against outsiders and a barrier to change, he cited it as the basis for reaching out to immigrants and minorities. He had been there too, and he recognized that Boston's diverse peoples could be harnessed for its common good.

Smoke-Filled Rooms

With Election Day less than three weeks away, one constant theme has been the vicious conduct of the two parties and the growing polarization of the country. Yet the popular image of partisans ripping each other to shreds obscures the reality that more Americans identify as Independents (42%) than either Republicans (25%) or Democrats (31%). This raises a question: Is it the country that’s polarized or just the two parties that run it? Whatever its shortcomings, the two-party system has provided remarkable political stability – usually by emphasizing political horse-trading over ideological purity – for a long time. The last president elected from a new party was Abraham Lincoln in 1860 when the country was on the eve of Civil War.

The major criticism of the old system was that the parties made compromises in order to build broad-based coalitions, and so they didn’t “stand for anything.” Yet the broadest coalition in our history was Franklin Roosevelt’s Democratic Party, which somehow managed to include labor unions, southern segregationists, northern blacks, populists, "urban ethnics", rural farmers and women. While it made some ugly compromises on racial segregation, it simultaneously prepared the way for the Civil Rights movement. What’s amazing is not that the party ultimately couldn’t survive its contradictions, but that it held them together for 40 years. And whether you like the New Deal’s legacy or not, it certainly got stuff done.

I used to disdain the old politics – the backroom deals, the compromises, the quid pro quo. They're looking a lot better from here.