Ye Olde Partisanship Is Nothing New WASHINGTON - An American political system marked by partisanship and polarization engenders despair from both Republicans and Democrats. Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, one of the few congressional Republicans who comfortably works with members of the other party, decided to retire last year lamenting "the sensible center has disappeared from American politics." Kent Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat who heads the Senate Budget Committee, said he realized it was "time for me to leave" when a senior colleague told him, "Your problem, Conrad, is you're too solutions-oriented. You've never understood this is political theater.' This is a periodic refrain. A generation ago it was even more pronounced and pessimistic, as I describe in my latest column. Jimmy Carter was president. With his legislative agenda stalled, he faced a challenge within his own party, a relentlessly hostile opposition Republican Party, a sluggish economy and runaway inflation. In the summer of 1979 the president gave a speech on America's "crisis of confidence." It often is labeled the "malaise" speech, though Carter never used that word. Four months later, Iranian radicals stormed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and held 52 Americans hostage for more than a year. This exacerbated the despair, coming as it did on the heels of the American defeat in Vietnam. "The last time we got involved with a two-bit country we lost 50,000 men," lamented one of Washington's wise men, the late Harry McPherson, who had been counsel to President Lyndon Johnson. Now we were involved with another one, and there was nothing we could do about it. Another of the presidential wise men, Lloyd Cutler, then counsel to Mr. Carter, wrote an article for Foreign Affairs suggesting that our political system was broken and America should consider changing to a parliamentary system. Ronald Reagan was elected, he proved to be a forceful president, and talk about altering the system diminished.