REIHAN SALAM ON DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS:

The Republican and Democratic coalitions are both political parties in the same way that whales and lemurs are both mammals, or that Finnish and Hungarian are both Finno-Ugric languages. Though they share some very broad characteristics, they are profoundly different. Our failure to understand the differences between the two parties sows confusion and resentment, so I’d like to clear things up.

One of the more amusing aspects of our politics is that Democrats will often accuse Republicans of being in the pocket of this or that special interest while Republicans insist that Democrats are wild-eyed ideologues. This is almost the opposite of the truth. It is Republicans who are the ideological ones, while it is Democrats who, in the wise words of political scientists Matt Grossmann and David Hopkins, are “a coalition of interest groups whose interests are served by government activity.” I realize that this is a massive oversimplification, but bear with me, because I think it illuminates why both parties keep falling in the same old patterns.

The Democratic Party is a collection of interest groups that seeks to, among other things, redistribute income and wealth from people who are not Democrats to people who are, or who will be, and they do a pretty good job of it, even when they lose elections. . . .

Republicans are rarely this slick. They’re far more likely than Democrats to be true believers who put ideology above all else and who struggle to achieve their concrete goals. They struggle because unlike ideological progressives, ideological conservatives believe that most people already agree with them, and that when they fail to win a particular policy fight, it’s because something shady and underhanded is going on. The fact that there are far more conservatives in America than liberals is, in a funny way, a liability for the right. Liberals understand that they can’t win without moderates; conservatives will only concede this unfortunate fact reluctantly, if at all. The result is that Republicans spend much of their time banging their heads against whichever wall happens to be close by.

Democrats also realize that they can’t win without dissembling and incrementalism, which the GOP isn’t as good at.

AN AMUSING SITE: Terrible Real Estate Agent Photos.

DANUSHA GOSKA: Ten Reasons Why I Am No Longer A Leftist.

THIS IS OBVIOUSLY EVIDENCE OF TIME TRAVEL: The superbug in the trenches: Drug-resistant bacterium found in 1915 soldier killed by dysentery – decades BEFORE penicillin and other antibiotics were in common use.

VIDEO: Watch These Astronauts Submerge A GoPro In Space.

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POLITICO’S BRUTAL OBAMA-TRIP HEADLINE: Lame Duck Swims To Asia.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Exclusive: U.S. may significantly hike number of troops in Iraq.

ONE OF MY FACEBOOK FRIENDS WAS TOUTING THIS RECIPE: Coq Au Riesling. Looks good.

22 HABITS of Unhappy People. I’d add “breaking things up into listicle/slideshows” as another cause of unhappiness. . . .

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Ariz. county won’t charge rifle-toting airport visitor.

ROGER SIMON: Letters to the Ayatollah: Obama’s ‘Keys to Paradise.’ “I admit I didn’t much care for Barack Obama before the revelation that he had secretly written Khamenei to induce the Iranian supreme leader to sign a nuclear deal in return for U.S. help battling ISIS. Now I despise our president. He is contemptible.”

YOU KNOW THAT OLD SOVIET JOKE? WELL. . . We now face a shortage of sand.

STANDING UP TO POLITICAL RACISM: GOP official goes off on NAACP for ignoring Mia Love and Tim Scott. We know, of course that the NAACP is really just a bunch of Democratic Party shills, but it’s nice to point it out.

PRE-ELECTION AIRBRUSHING: ‘Political’ pull? Border figures posted, removed month before election. “Staggering statistics that show nearly a half-million people were caught trying to enter the U.S. illegally — and more than half were not Mexican, a number far higher than in 2013 — reportedly were posted on a U.S. government website for just a few hours last month before being taken down. According to the Center for Investigative Reporting, the numbers were posted on the U.S. Customs and Border Protection website on Oct. 10 for roughly five hours. The dramatic numbers raised questions over whether they were yanked to protect the administration before key midterm elections.” Yeah, I think I know the answer here.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Princeton University under federal scrutiny for treating sexual assault as a crime.

I FIND THIS PLAUSIBLE: Dementia as a Consequence of Many Small, Unnoticed Strokes.

VIDEO: A feather and a bowling ball dropped together inside the world’s largest vacuum chamber.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 547.

DO TELL: Obama’s White House Can’t Take A Joke.

Obama’s team has spent years trying to develop the image of a president both cerebral and cool — a man who takes his time, thinks things through, and refuses to panic or be rushed into bad decisions. They’ve given us an Obama who would rather be right than popular. (And this is independent of whether, on any particular set of issues, you think he’s right.)

On this point, the president’s staff might usefully go back and look at Chernow’s book on Washington. Washington, too, carefully cultivated an image — in his case, the reluctant patrician, called to the bar of politics against his inclination, willing to serve his country only because his country demanded it of him.

Washington, like Obama, liked to take his time over decisions. He hated the give-and-take of everyday political life, the horse-trading so crucial, even in a much younger United States, to the success of any legislative program. He believed in a strong central government, in part “to override the selfish ambitions of local politicians.”

Which is where the lesson comes in.

Precisely because Washington was a man accustomed to keeping a certain distance, he allowed himself to be persuaded by Alexander Hamilton to hold regular “levees,” at which ordinary citizens, neither vetted nor prepped, could come chat with their president. The president avoided most social intercourse outside of his official duties, but held regular dinners with small groups of legislators, in the hope of making them, in Hamilton’s words, “his constitutional counselors.”

Yeah, but Obama doesn’t like people, and lacks Washington’s sense of duty.

WELCOME TO 1938: While Americans Mull Over the Election, Other Countries Prepare for War.

WELL, TO BE FAIR, HE’S FALLEN SHORT OF EVERYONE ELSE’S: Latino Community Worries Obama Could Fall Short of Expectations. And my expectations for Obama, even in 2008, were comparatively modest.

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INSTAVISION: My interview with Russ Roberts about his new book, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life is now available on YouTube.