Jon Chait: The purpose of winning elections is to solve problems like health care. There’s something strange about advice that presumes it’s appropriate to value the preservation of popularity above all else. I’ll be the first to point to institutional difficulties as the source of a lot our political parties, and that’s often at the [...]

Gerald Seib’s diagnosis of the Senate — its problems are merely a symptom of our political system’s larger dysfunction — is mostly spot on, with the exception of this bit: Yet the real issue here isn’t the number of filibusters and cloture votes needed to stop them, but that there is so little common ground [...]