America Held Hostage, Part II

In this Sunday’s New York Times, Matt Bai had a brilliant essay contrasting the partisan shootout in Washington with successful legislative terms in New York and New Jersey, where, despite sharp partisan differences, Governors and legislators moved together toward reform. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/sunday-review/10governors.html?pagewanted=all

Bai nailed the situation in Washington.  In his view, the last three elections have been misinterpreted by the leadership of the winning Congressional party as an ideological mandate (2006 and 2008 for restoring liberal activism and 2010 for restoring limited government).  To Bai, the elections weren’t ideological statements by voters, but rather outpourings of disgust over partisan gridlock, corruption and hypocrisy.  What voters were saying was, “clean up the mess and get our house in order”.  We couldn’t be further away from doing that in Washington right now. 

At the very time European financial markets are melting down, America is not asserting desperately needed economic leadership.  Rather, its “leaders” are dancing on the edge of a cliff, with each Congressional party daring the other to take the blame for destroying our credit, the value of our currency and our legitimacy as the leading economy on the world.   It’s an embarrassing spectacle, and one with the potential to send us right back into the financial abyss we crawled out of less than three years ago, lucky far more than wise.    Three tumultuous elections don’t seem to have affected a deeply toxic Washington political culture.  What do we have to do to get them to work together to solve our common problems?