Seeing as both guys are partisans but not ideologues, I think the reason they reacted as strongly as they did is because it particularly bugs them when "the system" in which they are or were invested, fails to respond. That both j-hoya and the boss of our shop used phrases like "Why can't these people act like friggin' grownups?" seems to strengthen the idea.
Ezra Klein made a similar observation:
Above all, though, this is a failure of politics. Like with global warming, with health care, with the national debt, with immigration. It is further proof that we have a calcified political system incapable of responding to either long-term threats or short-term crises. The electoral and partisan incentives have made actual action too dangerous and rendered obstruction everyone's easy second choice. And in politics, you just about never get your first choice. And so the Republicans killed this bill. Without their cover, the Democrats couldn't save it, because politically, they couldn't take ownership of it.
It's easy enough to imagine a society running atop a stable economy even when it has an unhealthy politics. And it's simple enough to see how an unstable economy can be calmed through concerted action by an effective political structure. But an economy in chaos and a political system in paralysis? What happens then?
That we're evidently paralyzed on both the big issues of long standing (global warming, immigration reform, health care, et al) and in crisis response, suggests to me that the ideas we sometimes mock PtK for--a new Constitutional Convention or other root-and-branch change--might be more worth taking seriously than I at least had thought. I'm not there yet myself, but who knows where it's all heading.
