Liberals, hinted Waldman in a Monday American Prospect column, need to remember that the legislative journey of a thousand miles begins with a few steps. Waldman acknowledged that even if “modest gun control” measures such as expanded background checks were to pass, the U.S. would “still have more gun deaths than any other industrialized country,” but that’d be better than the status quo.

Waldman likened that prospect to what he said is the important (though hugely insufficient) improvement in our health-care system that’s resulted from Obamacare. He called the Affordable Care Act “a reform, not a revolution” (though plenty of conservatives might argue that “revolution” would be more fitting).

Among the insights: Fiorina "has a notable facility for delivering answers that thrill conservatives but fall apart under close examination"; a discussion of childhood vaccines showed that the party is "fervid, claustrophobic, recklessly insinuating, and, at the same time, utterly timid when it comes to extremism in its own ranks”; and the GOP as a whole is "wedded to the tenets of [George W.] Bushism — rabid, debt-financed, regressive tax-cutting, reflexive hostility to regulation, and a pervasive anti-intellectualism."

To lefty pundit Paul Waldman, journalists are like detectives, not activists. They relish discovering and exposing the secrets of politicians, but they don’t much care whether the pols are liberal or conservative, given that “ideological bias is among the[ir] least important” motives.

For example, regarding recent New York Times stories about Marco Rubio’s driving record and personal finances, Waldman claimed in a Sunday American Prospect column that “no one who thinks about the news media in a serious way could believe that articles like these are driven by an ideological bias. If that were the case, then the Times would be giving Hillary Clinton a free ride, and they've done anything but…That goes for the rest of the media as well; whatever you think about Hillary Clinton, she's hardly a favorite of political reporters.”

And, who knows, some might even make the case that the media are pro-Rubio. After all, commented Waldman, they’ve “done plenty to elevate [him] from an ordinary first-term senator into a legitimate presidential contender.”

For liberals, the great mystery of the last few decades is how Republicans usually have won enough votes to control one or both houses of Congress even as the party moves increasingly to the right. As political-science profs Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson put it in their 5,500-word article in the spring issue of The American Prospect, “In a 50-50 nation, Republicans have learned how to have their extremist cake and eat it too.”

Hacker (of Yale) and Pierson (of UC Berkeley) contend that there are two major reasons why the GOP has been able to “mak[e] American politics ever more dysfunctional while largely avoiding accountability for its actions.” One is that our system of government, with its “dispersal of authority,” makes it hard for voters to see which party is causing the trouble. The other is that our “often-feckless news media” have routinely failed to enlighten the public that “Republicans are primarily responsible for polarization and deadlock” and that GOPers have engineered “an ongoing massive shift of…the ‘center’ of American politics…toward the anti-government fringe.”

In a Friday American Prospect piece (originally published on Wednesday in the Washington Post) WaPo columnist Harold Meyerson suggested that even though the South didn’t win the Civil War, its mean-spirited ideas, racial and otherwise, now drive the Republican party.

Meyerson asserted that today’s GOP “is not just far from being the party of Lincoln: It’s really the party of Jefferson Davis. It suppresses black voting; it opposes federal efforts to mitigate poverty; it objects to federal investment in infrastructure and education just as the antebellum South opposed internal improvements and rejected public education; it scorns compromise. It is nearly all white. It is the lineal descendant of Lee’s army, and the descendants of Grant’s have yet to subdue it.”