The Senate Rises Above Politics (If Only in Fiction)

The phrase “the politics of personal destruction” entered the American lexicon during the impeachment of President Bill Clinton.

Since 1998, it has become conventional wisdom that we are living through a uniquely vicious and polarized political period, a time when opponents no longer want to defeat each other, but to annihilate each other. Pundits speak of red and blue states as if a new Civil War was raging. Rumors and slanders that would once have been confined to the fringe -- such as the idea that President Obama is faking his birth certificate, or is secretly a Muslim -- enter mainstream discourse.