Seeds of a shutdown
Speaking at an Institute of Politics (IOP) forum, Time magazine columnist Joe Klein connected the shutdown of the federal government to a toxic political culture created by Baby Boomers. “My generation has reached its sell-by date,” Klein said Wednesday at Harvard Kennedy School. “The way to get past this is for those who are millennials to get past us.” The author of the Bill Clinton-inspired novel “Primary Colors” and a writer for Time’s Swampland blog, Klein, 67, is a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. He spent his early career as a writer for Boston’s Real Paper, a counterculture weekly. Decades later, he sees a harmful legacy in Boomer attempts to transform culture and politics in the 1960s and ’70s. Fractured coalitions were united into conservatives and liberals, but the middle was left unrepresented, he said. Gerrymandered redistricting and the 1965 Voting Rights Act gave blacks...