The circumstances of the debt-ceiling fight make compromise more likely than at any other time.
As the party leaders work towards a debt deal, Megan Liberman and Nate Silver discuss how the makeup of the House may make compromise difficult.
Failure, both at home and abroad, springs from a mood in Washington that seems to make compromise almost unthinkable.Debt need not become a clinching problem.
But the Bush administration has resisted such proposals, and the political stakes of a presidential election year make compromise especially tricky.
Partisan habits make compromise difficult, and Democratic strength in Congress gives President Obama's party the option of shoving legislation through without Republican support.
Palestine provides one counter-example: on both sides are zealots who make compromise all but impossible, and who are prepared to resort to violence to pre-empt any risk of it.
Indeed, the fact that greenery has suddenly become a hot topic may make compromise more difficult".There is a time to reap, and a time to sow," says Josh Dorner of the Sierra Club, an environmental pressure group.
As Bob Woodward's latest book reveals, the Obama administration devised the measure last year to include across-the-board defense cuts because it believed that slashing defense was so unthinkable that it would make compromise inevitable.
"The trick is not to make compromise impossible but to ensure that it is loud and noticeable so that the SOC can detect and respond to the threat," Foss explains.
It is also an open system so that tools and databases can be integrated into it in a plug-and-play way, data can be retrieved freely whenever and wherever they are required, and people can work concurrently and collaboratively to make compromise business decisions.
Will President Obama continue to make compromise after compromise?
