During the 1960s, Cokie’s father, Hale Boggs, served as the Democratic whip in the House of Representatives. For much of that time, the Republican leader was Gerald Ford, and in an interview with Cokie a few years before his death in 2006, Ford recalled the close personal relationship between the political rivals.

The two of them would regularly get in a car on Capitol Hill and head downtown for a lunchtime debate at a place like the National Press Club. Their differences were real, and their conversation spirited, recalled Ford, but then they would get back in the car and continue their friendship.

We thought of this story when Sen. Evan Bayh, an Indiana Democrat, recently announced his retirement by denouncing the “brain dead” politics of Capitol Hill. “There is too much partisanship and not enough progress,” he says. “Too much narrow ideology and not enough problem-solving.”

Most Americans agree, and Bayh gave the New York Times a series of reasons for this paralysis: The filibuster has been “increasingly abused by both parties”; lawmakers spend “huge amounts of time” raising money and kowtowing to special interests; ideological factions, promoted by cable TV, breed a culture where “compromise is a sign of betrayal or an indication of moral lassitude.”