In a guest column for the Detroit Free Press, Marina v.N. Whitman, the first woman appointed to the President's Council of Economic Advisers by President Nixon, said the bipartisanship of that era has disappeared from today's politics.
"Campaigns are partisan by their nature, of course, but there was a time when bipartisan efforts behind the scenes to solve urgent problems avoided the total gridlock that immobilizes our government today," Whitman writes.
"Many of our most critical economic problems are in principle soluble – indeed, many of my economist colleagues, both Republicans and Democrats, have sensible proposals for alleviating them – but there isn't a ghost of a chance that any of those ideas will be implemented before we are right on the edge of, and very possibly over, the fiscal cliff that bids fair to throw the nation, and with it much of the world, back into recession."
A professor of business administration and public policy, Whitman recently completed a book about the influence of her father, renowned mathematician John von Neumann, on her life and career. "The Martian's Daughter" will be published by the University of Michigan Press in September.