Maybe the problem is us

POLITICO'S Roger Simon recently interviewed White House chief of staff Bill Daley. When asked about today's body politic, Daley said: “The politics reflects the society. A lot of people say, ‘Oh, politics is so uncivil. Isn’t that terrible, why can’t they get along, gee, I’ve never seen anything like this.’ Well, it should be better, but maybe it’s more reflective of society.” Daley turned to reality TV and the cable news shows to underline his point: “[E]verybody yells at each other, they throw things at each other, they’re obnoxious to each other, they swear at each other. And watch the cable [news] shows. What gets [ratings]? The angry, the nasty, the insulting, the edge thing. So maybe politics is just more reflective of society than we want to admit. We want to think politics should be better. But maybe it is more reflective of us. And that may be what we don’t like to see.”