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Originally Posted by loquitur
oh, and about Carter: he was selective on human rights just like everyone tends to be. As for Reagan's good working relationship, if you recall, he had a majority in the Senate and enough Southern Democrats going along to be able to get tax cuts passed and a whole bunch of restrictions on the size of the govt early in his term. That lasted until he lost the Senate in '86, which IIRC was around the same time Iran-contra broke.
However, most of the Democratic party was screaming, continuously, that Reagan was a stooge of the rich, a warmongering numbskull who wanted to launch a nuclear war and wasn't smart enough to understand how horrible it was. I believe the term was "amiable dunce." And the Europeans were worse: they came out en masse to protest the Pershing missile placements that they were sure were nothing more than big provocations and huge targets for the Soviet Union. We know how that one worked out, don't we.
Basically, you can't fight something with nothing. If you don't believe in anything you give no one any reason to support you. Compromise works at the margins, but not at the core. Paul Wellstone, for example, didn't compromise much. I don't think Russ Feingold does much compromising either. They really believe(d) and stuck to it.
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Your recollection about the Demorcratic party screaming continuously is just revisionist history. Perhaps some of the more left leaning media and certainly European citizens (not the govts). For the most part, the Democrats in Congress neither underestimated nor demeaned (until Iran Contra) Reagan, other than such times as when he suggested that ketchup could serve as a vegetable for school lunches or when he mistook the mayor of Newark for his HUD secretary, to name just a few of the lighter Reagan moments. THey were critical of his "trickle-down" supply-side economic/tax policy, but so was his budget director, David Stockman, who subsquently resigned as a result and his VP George HW Bush, who, when campaigning against him, called it voodoo economics.
As for Wellstone and Feingold (and you can include folks like Kucinich and Ron Paul), its far different to be non-compromising when you are a legislator rather than the chief executive with the majority of the country opposing your core program....a program for which you cannot offer any evidence that it has a likelihood of success.
And the cannibalism and Civil War examples are hardly worth a response.