Sometimes when you look at election results it seems like the American people (or the 25 percent who bother to vote) are mostly voting for gridlock.

Maybe it’s that the committed partisans always want to keep enough of the Other Party on hand to serve as a scapegoat. More likely it’s that we really don’t trust either of these entities with complete control of anything.

Being the party that has good ideas, and being the party of performance, are two different things. Just look at the current GOP. It’s practically had a born-again experience as an activist, utopian promoter of world transformation since 9/11. But successes have been painful and too few.

Somehow I always feel like I’m standing on my head when I read these sorts of articles. Like winning political power is the ultimate goal, and doing something competent and widely approved just happens to be the strategy that’s working this week.

Being toward the center, or balanced between the extremes, is no guarantee of broad appeal or stability. Some of the most brutal punch-ups in American politics today are over issues where the public polls in broad agreement. Yet we can’t even agree about what we agree about.