Former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has died. It is interesting that I feel the same way about her as I did about Ronald Reagan: I liked her personally even though I did not always agree with her policies (indeed I mostly disagreed with them). That is probably why both were successful leaders of their countries. God speed Baroness Thatcher.
Back to American politics….
“Running for president is like sex. No one ever did it once and forgot about it.” — James Carville, quoted by Maureen Dowd.
“I think the emphasis on partisan polarization is misplaced. There’s nothing about strong partisanship that makes effective government in the U.S. impossible… Indeed: I suspect the game theorists might actually find that it should be easier for two well-organized parties to cut those deals, even if their ideal points are quite distant, than it would be to reach a deal between unstructured, factionalized parties, even if there are no extremists among them… And yet: dysfunction, crises, threats of shutdown and irrational outcomes no one claims to want.”
“My conclusion? It’s not partisanship. It’s not polarization. It’s not even extremism. It’s the Republican Party. The GOP is broken.”
The Washington Post reports on “an emerging Democratic strategy for taking back the House from Republicans after the tea party takeover of 2010.”
“The best way to defeat the conservative, ideologically driven GOP, Democrats say, is to field non-ideological ‘problem solvers’ who can profit from the fed-up-with-partisanship mood of some suburban areas. These districts will offer some of the few competitive House campaigns in the country.”
“The GOP’s greatest challenge is the fact that Democrats begin each presidential election with a near lock on the Electoral College. Twenty-one states and the District of Columbia have given their electoral votes to the Democratic presidential nominee in at least five out of the last six elections. These states represent 257 electoral votes out of the 270 needed to win the presidency. Under current trends, the GOP nominee has to pull the equivalent of drawing an inside straight in poker to get to the White House.”