Obama’s Health Care Aid to Small Firms Disappoints

One crucially important, but not-so-well-understood aspect of American politics is that business groups in the U.S. tend to behave in a highly ideological, highly solidaristic manner rather than as narrow interest groups. For example, check out this interesting item from my colleague Lee Fang:

Andrew Gelman, Nate Silver, and Daniel Lee bring the political science to try to understand senators’ behavior on the health reform debate. One interesting finding is that, at least as measured by answers to the question of whether the federal government should spend more money on covering the uninsured, geographic variation is real but much smaller than variation by age or income:

Tim Pawlenty’s got a Union Leader op-ed that I guess is supposed to illustrate his resumé as a Presidential contender. But amidst all the fulminations, we get to the point that anytime people decide to stop playing stupid political stunts and start talking about real issues, the differences in our politics narrow considerably: