[gvidas]

I don't think we ever elect people to cooperate. We elect people to "go to Washington and get the job done." To fight for our ideas over those of others. Mostly, we send people off to the District and hope (assume?) that they will cooperate once they arrive.

It's difficult in times like these, full of hardship and change, to watch politics with the right sized grain of salt -- not so cynical that you don't vote or participate (because then they won; and, besides, this is our country, not theirs -- it's theirs only in so far as they're one of us), but not so invested that you go up and down with the emotional rollercoaster (because then you just die early of stress, and your life is defined by someone else's bullshit.)

I think a lot of this has to do with the fundamental disconnect between politics and governance. As above, they care more about power and their position than we like to think: sometimes, like with the debt ceiling brinksmanship, you get to see it:

The mistake is that people tend to assume their politicians operate on the same axis of progress that they care about. But it's almost universally not true, though there is some (indirect) overlap. President Obama is not working on his constituents' axis of progress, he's working on his own. And he's not combatting Republicans on their constituents' axis of progress either, but against that of the narrow number Republicans he's actually in the negotiation room with.

And that, really, is the grain of salt that I'm coming to prefer: They all lie; they're all corrupt; it's only about power and money; good things get done for everyone else only as a means to more money and power; but vote anyway.

So this has been a good lesson to us all. This should not be understood as a "turning point" where President Obama revealed himself as a master Nth dimensional chess player thinking 20 steps ahead. This was a 1 dimensional chess game, and the mistake people have been making is they were assuming that his axis of progress was policy goals, when really it is influence and election goals. Just like the Republicans. This doesn't mean he's "with you" or "against you." It just means that you, as an observer who follows politics, should put politicians and their goals in the proper context in order to understand or predict their decisions. You can want one thing, but just recognize that even the politician who is the most in your corner is just trying to balance distinguishing his/her brand and getting re-elected. That's not a good or bad thing, that's just the outcome of our system of Democratic representation.

quotes from here: http://www.gnomanomics.com/2011/07/u...are-two.html):