As professor of political science at Williams College, erstwhile Washington bureaucrat, sympathetic biographer of F.D.R. and J.F.K., and unsuccessful Democratic candidate for Congress from Massachusetts, James MacGregor Burns has a lot of ideas about politics. Among other things, Liberal Burns is a strong believer in the notion that the President of the U.S. should firmly lead the Congress—and that is the central theme of his latest book, The Deadlock of Democracy: Four Party Politics in America.
Burns is pretty unhappy about present-day politics. Says he: "As a nation we have lost control of...