One of the things that has long annoyed me about political coverage in the traditional media is the careless, unsophisticated way that journalists – and many pundits who appear as guests on news shows – classify people according to their political views.
Forty years ago, when the first Earth Day was organized to draw attention to the serious environmental problems created by decades of thoughtless development and industrialization, few Americans realized the extent to which we had deforested our wild places, strip mined our mountains, and carelessly polluted our air and water.
After a year of fierce debate and wrangling, Congress has finally done something that many of the people who cover politics for a living in New York and Washington, D.C. have been telling the country had little chance of happening: it sent the Patient Protection and Affordable Care act to President Obama’s desk to be signed into law.
For much of our state’s recent political history, colorful and exciting top-of-the-ticket races have been a staple of the electoral landscape.
