k we want. If they are weak and dominated by polls, aren't they really trying to find out "the will of the people" in order to comply with it? If they are extremist and uncompromising in their political stances, aren't they simply reflecting the extremism prevalent in our country today? If politicians compromise, we call them weak, and if they don't we call them extremist. If we are unhappy with our government, perhaps it is because we expect the people who run it todo the impossible. They must reflect the will of a large, disparateelectorate, and yet be 100 percent consistent in their ideology. However, if we look at political behavior in terms of our ownpolarized, partisan attitudes, and if we can find a way to either reduce the competitive nature of campaigns, or reconcile pre-election hostility with post-election statesmanship, then we may find a way to elect politicians on the basis of how they will govern rather than how they run. It may be tempting to dismiss all this as merely "the way politics is" or say that "competition is human nature", or perhaps think that these behaviors are essentially harmless. But consider these two examples. It has been speculated that President Lyndon B. Johnson was unwilling to get out of the Vietnam war because he didn't want to be remembered as the first American President to lose a war. If this is true, it means that thousands of people, both American andVietnamese, died in order to protect one man's status. In OklahomaCity, a federal building was bombed in 1994, killing hundreds of men, women, and children. The alleged perpetrators were a group of extreme, right wing, "constitutionalists" who were apparently trying to turn frustration with the federal government into open revolution. I do not think these examples are aberrations or flukes, but are,instead, indicative of structural defects in our political system. If we are not aware of the dangers of extremism and competition, we may, in the end...
