'If the Democrats are smart enough to seize it,' Part II
Dan makes a good point about Krauthammer's health-care compromise: It'll take two parties to tango -- and he doesn't see the Republicans going along. I'm a little more optimistic about the prospects for compromise. So is Steve Pearlstein. But I'm not that optimistic. The Republican Party seems to be going through one of its periodic vitriolic convulsions. One of the big myths about modern politics is that today's nasty partisan politics can trace its roots to the 1960s. But David Halberstam, in his last great book, 'The Coldest Winter,' debunks that myth by debunking another generational myth dating back before the Korean War:

It was one of the enduring myths of American politics in the 1950s and 1960s that politics stopped at the water's edge, as if the foreign policy of the United States were some kind of sacrosanct area. ... Nothing was further from the truth. There had been considerable (if, on occasion, reluctant) bipartisanship during the WWII years, a bipartisanship that was in some ways involuntary, given the very considerable dangers posed by Germany and Japan, but it began to unravel almost as soon as the war ended. .... The Republican Party was badly split, caught in divisions that were deep, unhealable, and profoundly geographic. ... The Republican right had raged impotently. The more it lost (presidential elections), the angrier it became.

Etc., etc. And those are just snippets that don't include charges of 'treason' for 'losing' China and the 'un-American' nature of the New Deal. The left can be just as angry and ugly. Notice this sneering piece on Ted Kennedy by Alexander Cockburn. But parties and ideologues tend to be at their worst when their guys are out of power -- and right now that's the Republican Party and movement conservatives. Maybe a subhead should have been added to my earlier Krauthammer post: "If the Republicans are smart enough to seize it too."  ¶ 7:50 AM