{"id":4835,"date":"2010-02-09T09:49:55","date_gmt":"2010-02-09T14:49:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/2parse.com\/?p=4835"},"modified":"2010-02-09T09:49:55","modified_gmt":"2010-02-09T14:49:55","slug":"why-bipartisanship-is-impossible-the-parties-are-locked-in-a-zero-sum-struggle-for-control-of-the-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/?p=4835","title":{"rendered":"Why Bipartisanship Is Impossible: The parties are locked in a zero-sum struggle for control of the government"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/voices.washingtonpost.com\/ezra-klein\/2010\/02\/the_senates_problem_is_not_dis.html\">Ezra Klein<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The problem with the Senate is not that you can&#8217;t get 60 people out of 100 people to agree on something. It&#8217;s that roughly half the folks will lose any chance at a promotion, and they may even lose their job, if they agree with the other half. Bipartisanship isn&#8217;t impossible because people disagree on the finer points of American policy, though many of them certainly do. It&#8217;s impossible because the parties are locked in a zero-sum struggle for control, and you don&#8217;t gain an advantage if you give the other side a major accomplishment and then tell the American people they really did a good job reaching out to your and your colleagues. That&#8217;s the equivalent of saying to your employer, &#8220;Don&#8217;t give me a promotion, and in fact, think hard about whether you might want to lay me off next year.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>As I&#8217;ve\u00a0said before, it is very near to impossible to build out an ideological model explaining why Republicans who voted for the deficit-financed Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit would vote against the deficit-neutral health-care reform bill. But it&#8217;s very easy to build out a model explaining why Republicans would vote for a bill that would help them if it passed and against a bill that would hurt them if it failed. Same goes for Democrats. Good-faith disagreement is not the explanation that best fits the data.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ezra Klein: The problem with the Senate is not that you can&#8217;t get 60 people out of 100 people to agree on something. It&#8217;s that roughly half the folks will lose any chance at a promotion, and they may even lose their job, if they agree with the other half. Bipartisanship isn&#8217;t impossible because people [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[27,1023,4,458],"tags":[743,93],"class_list":["post-4835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-domestic-issues","category-health-care-domestic-issues","category-politics","category-the-opinionsphere","tag-bipartisanship","tag-ezra-klein"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8qcx-1fZ","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4835"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4835\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4837,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4835\/revisions\/4837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/2parse.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}