More partisanship, please
Civility is fine. But I want results most – and that means winning.
silver spring, md.
I'm not very interested in what Barack Obama calls the "politics of hope" although it sounds like a book I'd like to read. I much prefer partisanship. In the United States, it's the way things get done.
I do not believe that the election of Senator Obama would cause Republicans and Democrats to suddenly see the light and embrace their neighbors across the aisle, or that it would change their deeply held views about Iraq, taxes, or healthcare. A President Obama may very well set a more noble tone for his administration, but President Carter tried something similar, and look where it got him.
In the contest between what Bill Clinton in 1992 famously described as "change versus more of the same," change is a formidable opponent. The difference for this election is that, so far, the candidate of "change" isn't named Clinton.
Obama seems to have cornered the market on hope and idealism for this election, and he implies that you can't have either if what he calls "textbook" politics runs the White House.
But whose textbook would Obama have us follow instead? The one from England, where a parliamentary system (not to mention a monarch) injects a certain civility into the political machinery? Or maybe the one from the South Pacific archipelago of Vanuatu, named "the world's happiest country," by a study measuring well-being.
