can say we ll primary you if you don t stand in the most ideological place in the party. there s all kind of ropes why this goes. to my mind, anyhow, the only way our system has ever worked in an effective way, as i said, we ve said this before is through presidential leadership and that s something which has not worked and until we get that working we re going to be in the worse kind above signatures, in my judgment. how is presidential leadership address a filibuster threat? what s the causal mechanism. i ll give you and example. in 1983 tip o neill and president reagan worked out an agreement. they did social security, by the way which we have adjusted 40 times since it was originally passed in 1940 so it can be done with the right kind of leadership. i ll give you and example. why don t he talk about john
second, governors. oddly, jerry mannedering isn t worth getting into. it s the legislators who care more than governors. the legislators care about preserving themselves against primary challenges. put that aside but that is critical because that is what moves parties this way rather than toward the center. right. when it comes to the president, i m with chris on this. i think the president has made a series of missteps along the way. but having said that, you cannot negotiate with a party that simply refuses to negotiate. the republican party has been moving more and more into the grasp of a tea party that is so rigid and that has managed to scare the john boehners of the world. john boehner would have made a deal. i think mitch mcconnell would have made a deal. the fringe of the republican party has pushed barack obaobam willing to deal where he can t even defend a deal. the tea party voters, the base, majority want to raise taxes on the wealthy.
across the country decrying this state of affairs the gop response has been to advocate a set of radical tax proposals that would make the problem much, much worse, proposals that would funnel even greater shares of the national income in to the bank accounts of the 1%. in almost no other area of policy would making the problem worse count as a proposed solution. think about a social problem like drunk driving. imagine we were to learn that over several decade period drunk driving fatalities had increased dramatically. also during the same time the government has been passing all kind of foils make things worse, repealing open container laws, lowering the drinking age to 11 and allowing kegs to be installed at gas stations. and one major party s response is going to mandate automakers install a new bar in every new car made in america. if i want sounds preposterous,
veto forward movement. it gives that tiny fringe to block consensus progress. plain states, but continue. no, no, i m trying to be kinder. it s early in the morning. secondarily, why are there democratic senators from states that would clearly benefit from what the president has proposed, former governor mansion, senator mansion, were permitted to stray so far from what is core to democratic party, democratic party brings this em into the oval office and says, you re either in my party or you re not. we have i have the power of the presidency. vote with me. lyndon johnson would have made this happen. who was a much more partisan president. i mean, we re asking for two different things here. yes. that s a great point. that s a great point. a facilitator who can reach across the aisle with a fictitious no, i m saying is make the case more aggressively. that is where but it s unclear whether that meeting i think we have this sense that lbj, you know, we have all th
the distribution in this country that doesn t fully integrate how unequal society is and even from that model they want something more equal. we don t see the political system respond to that desire. mort, we were just talking during the break about the dysfunctionality of the system. there s a story of dysfunctionality of the political process advocated by people of my ideological ilk. it subverts any kind of populace message about taxing millionaires or financial transaction tax. do you think that s part of the dysfunction in the system? i think it is part of it. look, i ll give you another part of it. that s the ability of governors in every state to, shall we say, draw the congressional lines for each congressional district that s to maximize which ones go to the party that they belong to. then you have a situation where the extremists on both parties