Shorter version of yesterday's screed.
The voters Andrew Romano was deriding want jobs, retirement security and a health care system that doesn't threaten them with bankruptcy. No matter how frequently he and his fellow Beltway denizens characterize those voters as wanting the moon, these are not unreasonable demands. The rest of the OECD does a far better job than the US does at meeting them. The rest of the OECD does so without significantly lower growth rates and with better public infrastructure.
Cutely named cliques of elected officials are working in back rooms to find a way for the Congress and the President to not deliver what voters (very reasonably) want, and to do so without anybody's fingerprints on that failure. This is styled a "courageous" "Grand Bargain."
I don't know what kind of government you call that, but "representative" isn't one of the adjectives that come to mind.
