Word: mightly
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...took New Hampshire's example to heart - and allowed independents to vote not only in presidential primaries but in congressional ones as well - the consequences could be profound. Not only would more moderate candidates win, but the same candidates would stake out more-moderate positions, the result of which might be something of a bipartisan rebirth...
Second, more Crossfires. In today's highly segmented, partisan news environment, it's hard to create big new media institutions dedicated to objective news reporting. But it might be possible to create new talk shows and blogs in which liberals and conservatives interrogate one another's views - programs like the early (and more substantive) incarnation of CNN's Crossfire or William F. Buckley's Firing Line. There's no guarantee that the conversation would be edifying, of course. But it would be a useful antidote to the current cable and blog ghettos, where you can go years without hearing...
Third, more Ross Perots. Vicious-circle politics thrives because while gridlock sours the public on both parties, the out-of-government party (particularly if it's also the antigovernment party) benefits anyway. That might change were our political system filled with latter-day Perots, cranky independent candidates determined to punish both parties for not getting anything done. In the early 1990s, the original Perot combined an assault on the way government did business with a demand that it climb out of debt. Like the public itself, Perot believed there was a commonsense, nonideological way to cut the deficit, if only...
...talks about massive nuclear subsidies as just one part of his larger clean-energy agenda, but he hasn't made them contingent on GOP support for that larger agenda. So the nuclear subsidies are sure to pass, while the larger agenda is likely to stall. Eventually, extravagant government largesse might create a nuclear rebirth of sorts - but it might end up strangling better solutions in their cribs or prevent them from ever being born...
...third strand of thinking is more prosaic and might feel familiar to survivors of politics of the early 1990s. That too was an era of deep divisions and wildly swinging opinion polls: Obama's recent roller-coaster ride is nothing compared with the 50-point plunge in George H.W. Bush's ratings as he approached his re-election campaign. Then, as now, the culprit was a sour economy, but the voice of indignation came not from TV ranters but from a Dallas billionaire. H. Ross Perot catalyzed an anti-incumbent, back-to-basics, pox-on-Washington movement that...