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Announcements that Members of Congress will not run again, leaving behind some sharp words about dysfunction on Capitol Hill as did Indiana's Evan Bayh recently, seem to have become more frequent.

Leaving because the economic situation in America is far too tenuous for them to be associated with is my guess for the main reason Members retire. They don't want to be associated with an economic disaster or the long slog to economic stability, political dilettantes, if you will.

Being a Member of Congress is apparently becoming a less desirable job. Every where they turn there is opposition, blame, defamation. The thing that seems to be left out of the 'position' most individuals and organizations take on Congress or Members of Congress when they talk about the so called dysfunction, though, is the role of the American voter in the process. When you think about voters in Iraq recently going to the poles despite the possibility that they will be blown up, the turnout of American voters is somewhat embarrassing.

In an interesting study by Indiana University, academic experts were asked to rate Congress. There was some improvements over last year but experts gave the House and Senate D's for keeping excessive partisanship in check. Also interesting was the academics assessment of Americans in the areas of following what Congress does on a regular basis and having a reasonable understanding of what Congress can and can not do. Americans only received a D in those categories.

Of course, since you are reading TWIC you would get a higher grade, but what seems obvious to me and to many of my readers is that it is true; Americans are very uninformed about what Congress does each week yet very willing to blindly accept what someone tells them to believe.

From there it is not difficult to see how easy it is to have a jaundiced opinion about Congress or to elect Members who have less interest in making good management decisions and more in perpetuating their political career. R. McElroy. ##

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Polarization will not disappear quickly

by Lee Hamilton

'Every vote is looked upon as a political vote, with members of Congress asking themselves not, “What’s best for the country?” but, “How do we put the other guys on the spot and advance our own partisan interests?”'

In recent appearances, President Obama has suggested that it’s time for Washington to confront the intense polarization and incivility that mark our politics these days.

His first sally was his back-and-forth with the House Republican caucus at its retreat in Baltimore. He followed that a few days later with a speech to the National Prayer Breakfast decrying the “erosion of civility” in Washington and the inability of politicians in an increasingly partisan culture to listen to one other. “Those of us in Washington are not serving the people as well as we should,” he said.

Lots of ordinary Americans would agree with those lofty sentiments. But what’s notable is the growing concern in Washington that, when it comes to the actual business of governing, the nation’s political leaders appear so riven with conflict that they’re unable to move forward on anything. Both Democrats and Republicans welcomed the President’s visit with the House Republicans as a first, tentative step in trying to reduce partisanship.

Moves like these are important gestures. But intense partisanship is deeply rooted in the body politic now. Even if the entire leadership at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue were suddenly to embrace one another in honest fellowship, there would still be a long way to go in reducing polarization. That is because much of our political culture now works to drive people apart, not bring them together.

To begin with, we face a somewhat confusing paradox: In terms of electoral politics, the country is closely divided between left and right, with one side or the other gaining a majority depending on where independents choose to alight on election day. Yet in terms of political values, the nation is above all pragmatic and moderate, caring less about ideology than about what works.

The problem is that too much in politics — the extent to which congressional districts lock in a single party’s dominance, the increasing importance of primaries dominated by the ideologically driven voters in both parties, and hence the growing ideological homogeneity of both parties’ leadership — works to favor division, not pragmatism.

The result is that politics now drives policy on Capitol Hill. Every vote is looked upon as a political vote, with members of Congress asking themselves not, “What’s best for the country?” but, “How do we put the other guys on the spot and advance our own partisan interests?”

This trend toward the extremes has also been driven by political developments in the country at large. Demographic trends — the migration of African-Americans out of the South, the tendency of people of similar class and ethnic background to cluster together — have created communities and even regions that are dominated by one party or the other. This has been echoed by an explosion of advocacy organizations, so that groups that used to create consensus out of wildly disparate views no longer do so.

The political parties, which once forged consensus platforms at conventions that were notable for their diversity, now cater to their ideological activists. Advocacy associations — whether focused on the environment, agriculture, health, or whatever — that once needed to build an agenda acceptable to a diverse membership, now are so narrowly aimed that they feel free to pursue their parochial points of view.

The media, too, has fragmented. Americans get their information from a bewildering array of sources, and these days need never be troubled by reporting or analysis that doesn’t agree with their own preconceived views of the world. Punditry and commentary are what rule the media-sphere now, not hard reporting, and much of it is ideologically driven. There are very few prominent media voices pushing political Washington toward the center.

All of this has made it hard for fair, open-minded, and centrist politicians to gain any footing, and has pushed their counterparts in the population at large to withdraw from a politics they see as increasingly nasty, closed-minded and unattractive.

If there’s a solution, it lies with ordinary Americans willing to stand up and say “Enough’s enough!” The President and other political leaders can certainly try to change the tone in Washington, but they have an uphill battle to fight unless enough Americans make it clear that they are so tired of polarization, they’ll set their own ideological prejudices aside and place a premium on politicians who demonstrate they know how to work with people who don’t agree with them.

Lee Hamilton is Director of the Center on Congress at Indiana University. He was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives for 34 years.