[Tinordi]

Originally Posted by Displaced Flames fan

healthcare policy is the defining factor for where a party falls on the political spectrum?

Look, the point I am making is that my country is polarized. It really doesn't matter whether one group is more responsible for it than another. Give me people who are interested in reversing that. Hillary isn't. Where is the Brad Treliving of American politics? A bit of a silly analogy but it illustrates how I feel about Clinton as a leader moving forward.

This is a classic American political fallacy that's increasingly influential among politically disconnected people. The desire for a messianic president who will solve America's problems is fundamentally ignorant of the actual workings of government.

American's belief in the saving powers of the presidency are fundamentally misplaced and lead to this line of reasoning. "We need someone to rise above and solve our problems." No. You need to understand how your system of government works and how actually powerless the president is within that system. If you hate polarization vote for politically moderate candidates in congress and to hell with the president.

Please read this article:

The American system has traditionally had certain features that reduced the stakes—notably, political parties that encompassed a diverse range of opinions and often acted at cross purposes with themselves. But today the parties operate as disciplined, consistent units. According to Congressional Quarterly, in 2009 and 2010 Democrats and Republicans voted with their parties ninety per cent of the time. That rigidity has made American democracy much more difficult to manage—and it has made the President, as party leader, a much more divisive figure.

Edwards, ever the data cruncher, has the numbers to back up this perception. “When President Obama took office, he enjoyed a 68 percent approval level, the highest of any newly elected president since John F. Kennedy,” he wrote in a recent paper. “For all of his hopes about bipartisanship, however, his early approval ratings were the most polarized of any president in the past four decades. By February 15, less than a month after taking office, only 30 percent of Republicans approved of his performance in office while 89 percent of Democrats and 63 percent of Independents approved. The gap between Democratic and Republican approval had already reached 59 percentage points—and Obama never again reached even 30 percent approval among Republicans.”

This, Edwards says, is the reality facing modern Presidents, and one they would do well to accommodate. “In a rational world, strategies for governing should match the opportunities to be exploited,” he writes. “Barack Obama is only the latest in a long line of presidents who have not been able to transform the political landscape through their efforts at persuasion. When he succeeded in achieving major change, it was by mobilizing those predisposed to support him and driving legislation through Congress on a party-line vote.”

That’s easier said than done. We don’t have a system of government set up for Presidents to drive legislation through Congress. Rather, we have a system that was designed to encourage division between the branches but to resist the formation of political parties. The parties formed anyway, and they now use the branches to compete with one another. Add in minority protections like the filibuster, and you have a system in which the job of the President is to persuade an opposition party that has both the incentive and the power to resist him.

Jim Cooper says, “We’ve effectively lost our Congress and gained a parliament.” He adds, “At least a Prime Minister is empowered to get things done,” but “we have the extreme polarization of a parliament, with party-line voting, without the empowered Prime Minister.” And you can’t solve that with a speech.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2...urrentPage=all