Friday, January 26, 2007
SMALLNESS, POLITICS, ETC. Behind the firewall, Paul Krugman is exactly right about the inauspicious start of Sen. Barack Obama's (D-IL) presidential campaign.
For example, when Obama says...
The decisions that have been made in Washington these past six years, and the problems that have been ignored, have put our country in a precarious place......he sounds more like Sen. Joe Lieberman (CFL-CT) than any self-respecting poll ought to want to.
But challenging as they are, it's not the magnitude of our problems that concerns me the most. It's the smallness of our politics...Politics has become so bitter and partisan, so gummed up by money and influence, that we can't tackle the big problems that demand solutions.
Which is to say: Partisanship may not be the answer to our nation's problems, but it isn't the central defect of our politics either.
The central problem of the last six years was that we had an incompetent, reckless, law-breaking President and a Congress that enabled his administration every step of the way. The "tone in Washington" had nothing to do with it.
