From THE NEW YORK REVIEW:
…Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein — in the title of their new book, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks —argue that Congress—and indeed the whole American political system—is close to complete institutional collapse. We have entered a new politics of “hostage taking,” they tell us, epitomized by but by no means limited to the 2011 fight over the debt ceiling. And they strongly suggest that the ongoing fiasco of macroeconomic policy may be only the beginning.
It’s a remarkable if depressing book, especially impressive given its provenance. Mann and Ornstein are deeply respected congressional scholars, and their book would seem on the surface to epitomize the kind of bipartisan effort Washington insiders claim to love: Mann is at the liberal Brookings Institution, Ornstein at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Yet they reject the temptation to shade their conclusions in the name of “balance.” What the country faces, they write, isn’t a problem with partisanship in the abstract; it’s a problem with one party:
“However awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge, one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition. When one party moves this far from the center of American politics, it is extremely difficult to enact policies responsive to the country’s most pressing challenges.”…
Click here to read the full article.
EDITOR: Once again, we are paralleling the last hundred years and twenty years of the Roman Repubic.
While the Republican Party has become extreme, the article spends most of its time, correctly in my view, criticizing Obama’s handling of the economy and the insider Wall Street economic team he appointed.
Frankly, Obama made mistake after mistake on the economy. He barely did enough to stabilize the economy and no where near enough to actually get it going again.
I know Dems like to blame the obstructionist Repubs (who deserve some blame), but they need to look at their own party since it bears a lot (in my view, most) of the blame.
KZ