The dangers of us against them
On the eve of the midterm elections, the mayor of New York City and the host of a popular cable TV news show said that partisan rancor in Washington does nothing to solve the country’s woes and, furthermore, doesn’t reflect the more conciliatory attitude of the American public. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a Republican turned independent, and Joe Scarborough, the host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” both slammed the two-party system, which, Scarborough said, demands complete loyalty at the expense of effective governance. “It’s like a Mob family; you don’t get credit for being loyal to the family 95 percent of the time,” said Scarborough, a former congressman, during a discussion at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at the Harvard Kennedy School on Monday (Nov. 1). “You’re not allowed to go across to the other side. If you do, you pay a real price.” In an event billed “The Midterms & Beyond: A New...