In a Financial Times article in which he elaborately kisses the ass of President Bill Clinton, historian Simon Schama also elicits some fine political analysis from 42. An excerpt about the Tea Party:

“‘The Tea Party,’ Clinton says, ‘is the most extreme incarnation of the 30-year cycle that began when Ronald Reagan said in his first inaugural that government isn’t the answer, government is the problem. But the real issue is not that the Tea Party is in control of the country, has captured the airwaves or represents a majority of public sentiment; the problem is that something [the deal-making system] that has worked for the American people in the past isn’t working now.’

And the ideologues haven’t had their ‘Waterloo moment to break the fever,’ such as the two shut-downs of the federal government engineered by Speaker Newt Gingrich and the incoming House Republicans in 1995. That triumphant phalanx assembled beneath the banner of the Contract with America to which they vowed to remain uncompromisingly faithful. But the public hated the shut-downs and blamed Republicans to the point when it became apparent they had actually taken out a contract on themselves. It was Gingrich, not Clinton, who was ousted, the president winning re-election a year later. The manufactured spat earlier this year over raising the debt ceiling had Waterloo-moment promise, but the prospect of the US defaulting for the only time in its history and the risk of sending the already stressed bond market over the cliff meant that Obama, unlike Clinton, couldn’t call the naysayers’ bluff.

So what can be done about this latest edition of Know-Nothings? ‘You can’t convert the ideologues because they don’t care what the facts are. With the world as it is, you have to fight the fight you can win, and the fight you can win is economics.’ He gets intense at this point. ‘There isn’t a single example of a successful country on the planet today – if you define success as lower rates of unemployment, higher rates of job growth, less income inequality and a health system that produces the same or better care at lower cost – that doesn’t have both a strong economy and effective government that find some way to work in harness with each other … If you don’t do that, if you don’t have a system by which the poor can work their way into it, then you lose the social cohesion necessary to hold the country together and that is a big problem.”

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Schama discusses slavery in America with perpetually exhausted Charlie Rose: