I?ve blasted Newsweek editor Jon Meacham in the past for his interpretations of history, but he deserves points in his latest column for recognizing that Congress? ?failure? to act on health-care reform proposals is not necessarily bad in the grand scheme of things:
Though it is more fun to blame the president, or the Congress, or cable television, or the blogs, or Sarah Palin, in fact the system that has been declared unworkable in op-ed land is working the way it was supposed to work. It is a sign of success, not failure, when things move slowly, or not at all.
Some people want to change our system of government to improve the prospects for far-reaching legislative change. Meacham, no foe of President Obama?s proposals, is not so sure about that idea.
At the moment there are a number of very intelligent and well-meaning people who think that the basic 18th-century constitutional structure may not be suited to the challenges of our era?that, in other words, a government created in an age in which the building of roads was a big project could be unequal to the requirements of a globalized 21st-century world. But I think there is a perilous pride in hewing too strongly to the view that the past was an infinitely simpler time. Yes, the Founders were at work in a particular context, but the issues they engaged?chiefly those of ambition and appetite?are universal.
