I must be smarter than I thought.....apropos of the last post:
"Systems governed by only one set of rules are more vulnerable than those with variety."--Geoff Mulgan, Head of Policy of the Prime Minister of the UK.

The Right Wing Juggernaut Was A Bad Mistake, even for the Right Wing...The always readable Jonathan Rauch writes in The Atlantic this month about the very interesting idea that George Bush may have actually started out as a consensus-builder, like he was when governor of Texas. Finding himself at the crest of a right-wing juggernaut, however, crushed that impulse. Mr. Rauch sees the right-wing hegemony as destructive of what is known as "divided government", the state of affairs in which the branches of government are operating in a balanced opposition to one another. Nobody can dominate everything and the resultant legislation is achieved through a process of compromise. Further, he cites pollsters who conclude that this is the type of governing that most folks prefer. Finally, he cites Yale political scientist and author of Divided We Govern, David R. Mayhew as saying that "unified party control contributes nothing to the volume of important enactments."