Smooth Operators

John F. Harris makes the case that we could be in for a contest between cool-rocking pragmatists in era of angry extremism:

Any comparison between Obama and Romney shouldn’t be pushed too far. They are men of different generations, different formative experiences, different cultural tastes, and — no matter their shared instinct for pragmatism — different ideas of what the country needs.

But at the moment they do have a common bond. They both will run this year — and one of them will govern after 2012 — in a political system that demands balancing their own coolness and instinct for compromise against the hot and unyielding temper of the times.

Hat tip to Jim Lusby