The US is stuck in the mire of political dysfunction, unable to address problems big and small; its leaders talking past each other, rather than listening and reaching sensible compromise. The deaths on Sunday of two American politicians from a not-so-distant era serve to remind us that it does not have to be so, and that indeed, it often wasn’t.
Hugh Carey, who was 92, was the Democratic governor of New York who, in the 1970s, literally saved New York City and possibly the state from bankruptcy by imposing what no politician of his liberal stripe was supposed to do – a regime that caused pain to many.
Mark Hatfield, 89 when he died, was the five-term Republican senator from Oregon who defied party orthodoxy through his pacificism and environmentalism (though not always when logging interests were involved). He personified the liberal Republican, once a powerful force inside the party but a species now extinct outside Maine – and barely alive there.