Wedges and frames, two much-studied strategies of American political combat, are generally thought to be partisan weapons, meant to manipulate voters into making trade-offs that favor the political actor wielding them. My inquiry here explores whether there exists anything comparably schematic to wedges and frames at work in attempts by American politicians not to polarize but to find consensus, not to cater to extremes but moderate them. Despite the seeming paucity of such efforts in American public discourse, there is one such common and as-yet untheorized scheme, which uses the two issue positions involved in wedges to overcome the ill effects of reframing and the two value dimensions involved in reframing to overcome the ill effects of wedges. I elaborate this discursive structure by examining its presence in a number of American political debates, showing how it differs from other contemporary normative-theoretic frameworks for understanding compromise in American politics.

When the Council of Economic Advisers opened its doors in late 1946, many regarded the fledgling agency as a contingent of depression doctors armed with a “watered down” version of the Full Employment Bill. Instead, during the Truman era, the Council became, in the words of its second chairman, “an overall general economic advisory staff” generally concerned with major problems affecting the growth and stability of the American economy, including its adaptability to the special demands of international stress. Actually the “transition” of the agency to this broader role was more apparent than real, since the Employment Act itself clearly contained a charter for a general economic staff function if the new staff and its principal chose development in that direction. In the wartime deliberations which led up to the Act, the Congress was concerned not only to prevent a postwar depression but also to improve the integration of the whole economic policy formation process. And, in the final version of the Act, after making a very general policy declaration, the Congress decided, instead of drafting specific substantive solutions which would prejudge the source and nature of future economic problems, to establish procedural machinery to facilitate the intelligent diagnosis and solution of such problems when they did subsequently arise.

Are there appropriate limits to the application of rational choice in political decision making? Does rationalism in politics lead to absolutism? Is there a “pressing threat” to liberal democracy “posed by the irreverent conviction of the hegemony of reason”? In the June 1987 issue of this Review, Darrell Dobbs drew lesson from Homer's epic poem, the Odyssey, to argue the limits of rationalism in politics. In this Controversy, Robert Crafstein argues that Dobbs's case against rationalism is not proved. In turn, Dobbs holds to his construction of the relevance of Odysseus' nod to sacred values.

Is there any fundamental distinction between so-called “public” and “private” agencies, officers, institutions, corporations, associations, persons—legal entities and quasi-entities of all sorts? It is the theory of the courts that such a distinction exists, but their attempts through a maze of decisions logically to establish a principle of distinction have been futile.

Several bases of distinction have been adopted by the courts, including, first, the purpose or interest involved. “An office … seems to comprehend every charge or employment in which the public is interested.” Thus “private corporations are those which are created for the immediate benefit and advantage of individuals…. Public corporations are those which are created for public purposes.”

However, it is held that the whole interest in the corporation must be public to make it a public corporation. “Public corporations are political corporations or such as are founded wholly for public purposes and the whole interest in which is in the public. The fact of the public having an interest in the works or property or the object of a corporation, does not make it a public corporation.”

May 20,1936, was a date of importance in Cuban history. Not only was it the thirty-fourth anniversary of the birth of the Cuban Republic; it marked the first time in seven years (as many Cubans maintain) that a completely constitutional government had control of the island's political destinies. On May 20 of this year occurred the inauguration of Miguel Mariano Gómez y Arias, sixth “regularly elected” president of Cuba, son of the Republic's second president, and the man who, at least nominally, will be at the helm of the Cuban ship of state in the immediate future.

Perhaps the two most important constitutional events during recent years are the establishment of the South African Union and the struggle in Great Britain over the budget and with reference to the powers of the House of Lords. Both of these events are excluded from treatment here—the South African Union is discussed somewhat fully in another part of this Review; the British constitutional struggle is still in progress, and cannot be satisfactorily treated at the present time.

However, with reference to the South African Union it may be well to call attention to the movement away from loosely-constructed federal states. In the United States the state governments have steadily tended to become of less importance as compared with the national government, but this change has necessarily been produced not so much by textual changes in the constitution as by judicial interpretation. By the German imperial constitution of 1871 a fairly centralized federal organization was established, and since 1873 when the federal legislative power was extended over the whole field of civil law there have been no important extensions of federal power by textual changes in the constitution; but here as in the United States the federal power has increased at the expense of the states in a manner not shown by changes in the written instrument of government. “The most important and most weighty interests of the nation are common to all and must be cared for in a uniform manner, and all branches of public law and political life stand in a close and indissoluble relation the one to the other, so that by the logic of facts particularism must give place to unity, the common will must to an ever increasing extent displace the separate wills of the individual states.”

The institution which is today termed the president's cabinet was, in its origin, a creation of George Washington. It grew out of the need of a vigorous, well organized and well directed central administration which should somehow be closely associated and unified under an executive chief magistrate.

Even before the close of the Revolutionary War there were signs that men desired to see the continental government in the guidance of a capable and trusted chief. There were occasional suggestions, too,—among which Pelatiah Webster's is quite the best known—that a committee or board of administrative officials not too strictly hampered by congress, might aid the chief executive as counsellors. Though ready after a brief discussion to establish a single executive magistrate at the head of the projected government, the convention of 1787 seems to have balked at Gouverneur Morris's crude plan for a president's council. The convention yielded, however, to the president the right to require from the principal officers their opinions in writing, and thus unconsciously helped to predetermine a privy council. In the early autumn of 1787 George Mason of Virginia expressed his fear lest there should “grow out of the principal officers of the great departments” what he termed a Council of State. The phrase was quickly reiterated by George Clinton of New York. James Iredell in answer to Mason, perceiving and writing of the analogy between some such body and the English cabinet committee, viewed the possibility of its existence in the new American government as in no wise dangerous.