How reactionary are our politics?

[UtahDan]

There was an excellent column in the Washington Post yesterday by Robert Kagen entitled Power Shifts in 2008 (A Democrat might not be a different as you think):

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...052601595.html

The thrust of the piece is that both parties historically get very out of whack in their thinking when they are the opposition party, only to find when they regain power that there really aren't that many options open to then and as a result US foreign policy never changes that much.

He makes a very interesting argument here that the Democrats (as the opposition party) have ascribed most of the problems in the world to GWB and the way he has handled them, when in fact we are in a very different world than the one Bill Clinton led us through. He further states that it may be important for Democrats to govern next so that they will have to confront this reality and as a result we as a nation will be on much more the same page as we face difficulties ahead.

It is a very elegant argument and has a lot of merit IMO.