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It's very bad when one party has a stranglehold on both the Executive and Legislative branches of government.



Seriously, political parties don't represent unified ideologies. They're institutions groups can manipulate to obtain power. That whole health care reform bill, despite Obama's insistence that there are "other silvers in the drawer", that whole bill was the public option bill. All of the political capital gained in their defeat of Bush Jr. was expended towards the public option. Everything else, you had to dig to find out what was going on.

Little to no attention was given to National Health Exchanges which is now obviously the direction the country has to go in to reduce health care costs. Very little emphasis was placed on them in that bill. The only significant cost control measure in that entire bill was the public option. So, as health care costs continue to spiral, the public option becomes more and more the established answer. And, that's why liberals were so giddy about that bill. The fail back is the public option. And, when the public option gets big enough, it becomes single payer.

The public option didn't have very much support till the liberals started banging their head on Democrats to support it. I remember a news story when the liberals got 26 Senate votes in favor of the public option. It was a major victory for them. They went on to damn near get it passed.

But, to understand that, you've got to note that it's mostly moderates in the Democratic party. I saw a poll not too long ago where they looked at various polling. ~40% of the country is conservative, ~40% is moderate, and ~20% is liberal. Source: Click

Liberals are to the Democrats just like the religious right is to the Republicans.

And, it was shocking how much public support the liberals were able to muster up amongst all the confusion of health care reform. It's not clear how much the public supports the public option because if you subtly change the wording of your poll, the results differ dramatically. Because the results are based on such subtle wording changes, it indicates the public just don't understand the issue enough. But, they were able to get quite a bit of support.

When politicians actually have to go across the aisle to make a deal, it's one of the few places we have left in our political system that isn't dominated by financial interests. And, small groups can't as easily manipulate their party to achieve their ends.

When the party sets about trying to pass shit via party line votes, ignoring the other party, they run around talking shit about dropping financing for your next campaign, which basically means you'll lose. But, if they have to go across the aisle for votes, and are having trouble getting votes there, threats for cutting off financing don't make as much sense.