Here's a political question for all of us. If you generally support Democrats, can you name any tactics that President Obama has used while in office that you believe are unfair? If you support the Republicans, can you name any tactics that Republicans used in Congress to oppose Obama thst you believe are unfair?
This should be a good test of where the balance of partisanship vs. principle is for all of us, and particularly interesting a year from now when party control may be different from the status quo/
Not to be (utterly) contrarian, but there used to be more of a clear line between politics and governance, and the larger one's constituency over which one has authority the greater the need to sacrifice tactics and strategies of politics for those of governance.
It's clear that Republicans have governed more politically than they should, and there are some instances where Obama has pushed his personal agenda, which you could call politics, more than he should have.
But the difference between politics and governance now compared to "how it used to be" is that there isn't much of a difference on the GOP side. That's evidenced by their one-sided social agenda that is more exclusionary than inclusive. The Dems have their social agenda, too, but because their base spans more racial, ethnic and religious categories they are biased more toward inclusiveness than away from it.
I'm confused by which Party is less diverse economically. Democrats favor funding social programs, which aids people in the bottom tiers of the economic system, and Republicans favor businesses, which sell to everyone.
But I'm also willing to believe that the good old days that I remember so well and so fondly never really happened at all. Every President brings an agenda into the office and does as much as possible to see it into legislation and policy. That's not politics, but its fruits. Neither LBJ nor Nixon was more "political" then the other, but they pulled the country in opposite directions.