In the weeks before the debt-ceiling debacle was resolved, Barack Obama took a cultural wander through the recent history of U.S. political dysfunction. He started reading Rick Perlstein's powerful book Nixonland , whose thesis and subtitle, The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America , suggest the beginnings of the current political chasm. The President also watched the brilliant 1976 film Network , which predicted our current TV-news carnival. For Obama, these two works are history: he was a child in the '60s, just barely a teenager when Network debuted. For me, they're memory lane. And I can tell you that American...
