dysfunctional government in washington, particularly the extremism of the republican party and how the party has evolved in such an extreme fashion, it s made governance extremely difficult, if not impossible in washington. i want to give a little empirical grounding to this. because there s one of these arguments you can have that can begin to sound very abstract about who is more extreme than whom. politicians have come up, keith poole, political scientist keith poole and howard rosenthal have come up with this now famous index, a way of analyzing where parties are in their ideological extremism and here s a graph showing house polarization 1879 to 2011. what you see is the upwards tick of the 90% republican and 10% republican, the ends of the party, they shoot up much faster than the bottom two lines. which means they re veering off to the right much faster than the democrats are veering off to the left and the same thing more