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On the second day, after a 7 A.M. choice of Catholic Mass or Bible study, the political analyst Charlie Cook gave a sober presentation about current demographic trends, demonstrating that the Party was doomed unless it started winning over Asian-Americans, Hispanics, and younger voters. He also noted that forty per cent of the electorate is moderate—and Republicans lost that constituency by fifteen points in 2012. Thanks to congressional redistricting, Republicans were able to hold on to the House of Representatives, and Cook said that the Party could probably keep it for the foreseeable future, but he warned that the prospects of winning back the Senate, and the White House, would require dramatic change. There are only twenty Republican women in the House, and Kellyanne Conway, a G.O.P. pollster, gave the overwhelmingly white male audience some advice: stop talking about rape.

Cantor is the House Majority Leader, which means that he is responsible for the mundane business of managing the schedule, the House floor, and committees, where legislation is generally written. He has used his position to transform himself into the Party’s chief political strategist.

Typically, the law that passes at the end of these standoffs could never have passed at the beginning.

Not this time. The bill, which cleanly funds the government, suspends the debt ceiling, and creates a bicameral budget committee, passed with mostly Democratic votes.

By and large, Obama’s instincts are the instincts of a moderate Republican. His policies are the policies of a moderate Republican. He stands where the GOP used to stand and will someday stand again.

Yes, Obama began his presidency with bailouts, stimulus, and borrowing. You know who started the bailouts? George W. Bush.

Once the economy began to revive, Obama offered a $4-trillion debt reduction framework that would have cut $3 to $6 of spending for every $1 in tax hikes. That’s a higher ratio of cuts to hikes than Republican voters, in a Gallup poll, said they preferred.

while the Bush administration took wise and bold steps to correct the disaster, the unpopularity of its Troubled Asset Relief Program bequeathed the Obama administration a political disaster alongside the economic disaster.

If Republicans are to act effectively and responsibly, we need to learn more positive and productive lessons from the crisis.

On The Daily Show, Chris Christie claimed there was a difference between disaster relief and setting up the health insurance exchange. Jon Stewart replied, ‘If you have cancer and don’t have health insurance, that’s Hurricane Sandy.’

Christie said that he vetoed the health insurance exchange because he wasn’t sure how much it would cost his state. Stewart pointed out that the government didn’t stonewall Christie on disaster relief by asking for all the details first. Gov. Christie replied, “The difference is that here, we have people in New Jersey who are in a crisis situation that could not be anticipated. And from my perspective, the federal government’s always stood up for that proposition, whether it’s Katrina, Ike, Gustav, they’ve come forward and done that, so they are not doing anything different here. Stewart said, “Here my point, and this is where I part ways with the Republican Party in an enormous way. If you have cancer and don’t have health insurance, that’s Hurricane Sandy.” Gov. Christie said that not having a state exchange is not the same as not having coverage. Stewart made a broader philosophical observation about the Republican Party, “It always seems to me that for the Republican Party. If it’s not something they need, it’s an entitlement of the forty seven percent that are sucking things out of the government. But when they need it, there’s all the reasons in the world it should be there to the tune of thirty billion dollars.” Christie said that he was representing all of New Jersey, while dancing around the idea of priorities. Stewart expanded on his point, “The philosophy that I always seem to see from them is things that other people need are entitlements. Things that they need are things that should be done quickly and immediately…They have empathy for things that affect them, but have a hard time seeing the picture that other people are suffering.”

Chris Christie dodged Stewart’s point that Republicans appear to have an inconsistent set of priorities. They are all about the federal government when they need something, but the federal government is bad when they try to extend healthcare coverage. How would Christie like it if the federal government told New Jersey that no disaster relief would be released until the exact cost was known? Christie didn’t want to tell Stewart the truth. Last month the Koch Brothers warned him not to set up the health insurance exchange. His veto had everything to do with trying to get back into the good graces of the right wing billionaires who will be critical to his 2016 presidential campaign. Christie doesn’t want his “brand” tarnished by working with the Obama administration on the health insurance exchanges. That’s what this is really about. The Republican governors who are taking an ideological stand against these exchanges are hurting the people of their states. I believe that the state/federal partnership option would be the most effective. States should at least have a hand in running these programs, because local and state governments understand the needs of their residents and are in the best position to efficiently run these exchanges. But when Republican governors put partisan politics or presidential aspirations ahead of doing what’s right for their states, the result is a muddled and inconsistent philosophy like Chris Christie’s. Jon Stewart was right. For the uninsured who are dying everyday, their illness is their Sandy. Chris Christie doesn’t want to say this, but he’d rather be president than help the uninsured get the best care possible.

The first is the obvious one: Republicans are quite plainly scared to death of entitlement reform. They're happy to vote unanimously for symbolic bills like the Ryan budget because they know no one really takes them seriously. But if you ask them to put real, concrete cuts to Medicare and Social Security on the table, they tentatively suggest a couple of smallish items (raising the retirement age, adopting chained CPI) and then back off. The reason for this is pretty obvious: they know that long-term cuts won't affect the current deficit, while short-term cuts will provoke an angry backlash among seniors. And they can't afford that backlash since seniors make up a big chunk of their base.

The second peculiar thing about all this is also pretty obvious: why the obsession with the debt ceiling? It's an unusually reckless bit of extortion that opens up Republicans to legitimate scorn, but it's not really necessary. If Republicans want to fight over spending, they can instead fight over the budget. That would lead to a government shutdown a la 1995, followed by a deal of some kind. The pressure this puts on Obama is similar, but it's far more defensible. Republicans aren't refusing to pay their own bills and they aren't recklessly putting the creditworthiness of the United States at risk. So why not have this fight over the budget rather than the debt ceiling?

U.S. President Barack Obama hopes that the Republicans prove rigidly ideological.

John Boehner, already has indicated that he does not intend to play Gingrich but rather is prepared to find compromises. Since Tea Party members are not close to forming a majority of the Republican Party in the House, Boehner is likely to get his way.

I’d like to consider the opposite side of the coin, namely, how foreign governments view Obama after this defeat.

This economic downturn structurally resembles the depressions of the 1890s and the 1930s rather than the cyclical recessions that have recurred since World War II. The American people, mired in debt, with one in six lacking full-time employment, are not spending; and businesses, uncertain of demand for their products, are not investing no matter how low interest rates fall. With the Fed virtually powerless, the only way to stimulate private demand and investment is through public spending. Obama tried to do this with his initial stimulus program, but it was watered down by tax cuts, and undermined by decreases in state spending. By this summer, its effect had dissipated.

Many voters have concluded that Obama’s stimulus program actually contributed to the rise in unemployment and that cutting public spending will speed a recovery. It’s complete nonsense, as the experience of the United States in 1937 or of Japan in the 1990s demonstrated, but it will guide Republican thinking in Congress, and prevent Obama and the Democrats from passing a new stimulus program.

as the Obama administration recognized, much of the new demand will focus on the development of renewable energy and green technology. As the Chinese, Japanese, and Europeans understand, these kinds of industries require government coordination and subsidies. But the new generation of Republicans rejects this kind of industrial policy. They even oppose Obama’s obviously successful auto bailout.

In other words, the White House blamed Democrats' 2010 defeat on the loss of independents, and to win them back, it will try to slow the growth of government, encourage a bipartisan spirit in Washington, and reform the government process by eliminating things like earmarks.

When Democrat Nancy Pelosi became speaker of the House, the leader of the lawmaking branch of government, she said her priority was to … elect more Democrats. After Republican victories in 2010, the Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said his goal was to … prevent the Democratic president’s reelection. With the country at war and the economy in recession, our government leaders’ first thoughts have been of party advantage.

Ours is a system focused not on collective problem-solving but on a struggle for power between two private organizations.

What we have today is not a legacy of 1789 but an outdated relic of the late 1800s and early 1900s, when Progressives pushed for the adoption of primary elections.

But the lesson of the election is that the Obama coalition was truly vulnerable only to a Republican Party that took Obama seriously as an opponent – that understood how his majority had been built, why voters had joined it and why the conservative majority of the Reagan and Bush eras had unraveled.

In part, that failure can be blamed on their standard-bearer, Mitt Romney, who mostly ran as a kind of vanilla Republican instead of showing the imagination necessary to reinvent his party for a new era.

A weak nominee in many ways, he was ultimately defeated less by his own limitations as a leader, and more by the fact that his party didn’t particularly want to be reinvented, preferring to believe that the rhetoric and positioning of 1980 and 1984 could win again in the America of 2012.

That’s what makes “The Righteous Mind” well worth reading. Politics isn’t just about ­manipulating people who disagree with you. It’s about learning from them.

David Hume, the Scottish philosopher who notoriously said reason was fit only to be “the slave of the passions,” was largely correct. E. O. Wilson, the ecologist who was branded a fascist for stressing the biological origins of human behavior, has been vindicated by the study of moral emotions.

To the question many people ask about politics — Why doesn’t the other side listen to reason? — Haidt replies: We were never designed to listen to reason. When you ask people moral questions, time their responses and scan their brains, their answers and brain activation patterns indicate that they reach conclusions quickly and produce reasons later only to justify what they’ve decided.

The inequality of wealth and income in the U.S. has become an increasingly prevalent issue in recent years. One reason for this is that the visibility of this inequality has been increasing gradually for a long time--as society has become less segregated, people can now see more clearly how much other people make and consume.

imagine that we took all Americans and sorted them by wealth along a line with the poorest on the left and continuing as wealth increases until on the right we have the richest. Now, imagine that we divide them into five buckets with an equal number of citizens in each. The first bucket contains the poorest 20% of the population, the next contains the second wealthiest tier, and so on down to the wealthiest 20% (see Figure 1).

After he switched to the Republican Party in 1962, Ronald Reagan famously quipped: “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The party left me.”

At Tuesday morning’s meeting of the House Democrats, caucus chairman John Larson rallied his colleagues for the day’s debt-limit debate by playing an audio recording of the 40th president.“Congress consistently brings the government to the edge of default before facing its responsibility,” Reagan says in the clip. “This brinkmanship threatens the holders of government bonds and those who rely on Social Security and veterans benefits. Interest rates would skyrocket, instability would occur in financial markets, and the federal deficit would soar. The United States has a special responsibility to itself and the world to meet its obligations.”

Tea Party Republicans say they would sooner default on the national debt than raise taxes; Reagan agreed to raise taxes 11 times.

The first is the massive, unprecedented, destructive and radical use of a non-filibuster filibuster to make the Senate unable to pass anything significant without 60 votes, rather than 51 (or 50 with the veep). This is not conservative. It's a blatant attack on tradition in defense of pure partisanship.

The national political dynamic has resulted in an extended immobilization of the government. With the House -- a body where party discipline is the norm -- under Republican control, passing legislation will be difficult and require compromise. Since the Senate is in Democratic hands, the probability of it overriding any unilateral administrative actions is small. Nevertheless, Obama does not have enough congressional support for dramatic new initiatives, and getting appointments through the Senate that Republicans oppose will be difficult.

I am not sure that the current political climate is what was meant by the people disciplining themselves, but it is clear that the people have imposed profound limits on this government. Its ability to continue what is already being done has not been curbed, but its ability to do much that is new has been blocked.

The gridlock sets the stage for a shift in foreign policy that has been under way since the U.S.-led intervention in Libya in 2011. I have argued that presidents do not make strategies but that those strategies are imposed on them by reality. Nevertheless, it is always helpful that the subjective wishes of a president and necessity coincide, even if the intent is not the same.

Barack Obama just trounced a Republican opponent for the second time. But unlike four years ago, when most conservatives saw it coming, Tuesday's result was, for them, an unpleasant surprise. So many on the right had predicted a Mitt Romney victory, or even a blowout -- Dick Morris, George Will, and Michael Barone all predicted the GOP would break 300 electoral votes.

Those audiences were misinformed.

The conventional wisdom has it that partisan gridlock and dysfunction have become the new normal.

the present objective of congressional Republicans is to render the executive branch powerless, at least until a Republican president is elected

Those arguing that the Tea Partiers aren't really anything new tend to point out that the vast majority of them are Republicans. But by itself, that isn't really surprising or conclusive. This new chart from Gallup, on the other hand, documents that the political concerns and priorities of Tea Party supporters are virtually identical to those of Republicans: