Comment & Debate
Michael Kinsley. “McCain’s Last Mistake. Undivided government won’t be as bad as he warned it would be.” Slate. 4 Nov. 2008 – “People who want divided government are afraid of politics. They imagine that under divided government, the wise elders of both parties would sit around a table and “rise above politics” with pragmatic solutions for everything. But it doesn’t work that way, and it shouldn’t. Our disagreements are generally about trade-offs—money for some new government benefit, the blood of our young for some foreign-policy goal, freedom for protection from terrorists, bureaucracy for the safety of drugs or cars or financial derivatives. All of these trade-offs could be settled by letting some board of elders split the difference. But then it wouldn’t be much of a democracy, would it?”