How did Barack Obama, a “center-left pragmatic reformer” advocating “a moderately activist government constrained by a sense of trade-offs” polarize the public and the Congress so quickly and so thoroughly during his first 18 months in office? First, Americans were polarized from the...

The revelation that hundreds of House members had regularly overdrawn their checking accounts with the House bank without penalty injected a new and unanticipated issue into the 1992 elections. The consequences were profound. The scandal was a major reason for the unusually high turnover of...