Albert R. Hunt, Columnist

Don't Bother to Wait for a Centrist Political Revival

In the battle between liberals and conservatives, partisanship keeps coming out on top.

April 16, 2017 at 2:00 PM UTC

Albert R. Hunt is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was the executive editor of Bloomberg News, before which he was a reporter, bureau chief and executive Washington editor at the Wall Street Journal.

Divided we stand.
Photographer: Angelo Merendino/Getty Images

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I wasn't a big fan of PowerPoint presentations until I saw the one Tom Davis uses to depict some depressing trends in American politics. It shows polarization, which is no surprise. What's striking, though, is how he represents it graphically.

Davis was a seven-term Republican representative from northern Virginia and twice ran the party's congressional campaign committee. His knowledge of U.S. politics is encyclopedic. In 1969, his best friend at Amherst College, David Eisenhower, took him to Washington to meet Eisenhower's father-in law. That was President Richard Nixon, who was so impressed that he offered Davis a job as a White House intern.