Thomas E. Mann Quotes
Partisanship particularly increased after the 1994 elections and then the appearance of the first unified Republican government since the 1950s.
Mann, Thomas E., and Norman J. Ornstein. The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track. Oxford University Press, 2006.
Lecture, FDR Presidential Library, Hyde Park, NY, June 24, 2006
formerly 2nd Viscount Stansgate
The historian was comparing Obama to other historical presidents who either had a majority of both Houses of Congress or had an opposition party that was generally quite cooperative and willing to compromise for the sake of running the country smoothly. At this point in time there was a Tea Party wing of the Republican that was particularly negative and obstructionist. They tended to threaten and intimidate the main stream Republicans who used the filibuster to block legislation the majority of Senators had voted for more times than all the other Congresses in American history. And that was only in Obamas first 6 years.
The first Jew to run for the Vice Presidency on a major party ticket.
At the time Congress was gridlocked in bitter hyperpartisan conflict. Most people called for more comity and bipartisanship and most politicians wanted more bipartisanship but blamed the other party for the rift. Mourdock, arguing for less bipartisanship and no compromise defeated Richard Lugar in the Republican Senatorial Primary election. Lugar, one of the most respected and effective Senators was a statesman who worked with any and all to find effective compromises to reach national solutions. The nation was so politically polarized that the Republican Indiana voters ousted one of their most senior senators because he was effective at developing national solutions. See {626717} and {302706} for other Mourdock’s outrageous comments. While this rhetoric won in the Primary, it lost him the general election in a state where Republicans had a strong majority and should have had the seat.
The Republicans had been badly beaten in the 2012 Presidential Election. Many attributed the loss to the dissatisfaction of the electorate with the Republican ideas which had become more and more conservative in recent decades. Others, like Rubio, wanted to maintain the existing ideas which were very different from the Republican ideas earlier when they won more elections.
The Tea Party Republican faction was opposed to government doing much of anything other than Defense and Foreign Policy. The regular Republicans saw a much more extensive and robust role of government though few did so to the same extent as Abraham Lincoln and the other founders of the Republican Party, and Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower the Republicans following in the Alexander Hamilton tradition.
Thomas E. Mann is the W. Averell Harriman Chair and a senior fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, a non-partisan think tank based in Washington, D.C. He primarily studies and speaks on elections in the United States, campaign finance reform, Senate and filibuster reform, Congress, redistricting, and political polarization.
