Excerpt
JEFFREY BROWN (Newshour): And now: the problem of governing in America today.
These days, it's unusual for a pollster to find anyone who's happy with Washington, and politicians themselves regularly air their frustrations. We begin our series of conversations examining this phenomenon with some historical perspective.
Beverly Gage of Yale University, former Senate historian Richard Baker, co-author of the new book "The American Senate," and Richard Norton Smith of George Mason University,....
Significant excerpt
BEVERLY GAGE, Yale University: The founders of course spent much of their time contemplating this idea of a public good, trying to set up a situation in which partisan impulses, internal impulses, regional impulses, state impulses, in which all of these would be tamped down enough that, in fact, the government would function and, in fact, we would produce legislators who would act in a broad public good.
This was the essential of the small-R Republican idea originally. And, of course, that's worked better and less well over the years since. I think what we have really lost now is a conversation about it. Right? I mean, it's sort of been taken for granted that this doesn't exist anymore, that there is nothing else beyond partisan warfare in Washington. And we used to have more gestures toward the public good.
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