It's Even Worse Than It Looks

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It's Even Worse Than It Looks is a 2012 book by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein. They are respected Washington analysts from the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute, and the book was published by Basic Books.

The authors argue that the U.S. Congress has become almost useless because of sharp political polarization and the rise of hard-line views. They say the two main parties now act like rival, parliaments in a winner-takes-all system, which makes it very hard for the government to do its work.

A big focus of the book is the Republican Party. Mann and Ornstein say it has moved far to the right and uses tricks to dodge clear votes rather than seek compromise. They describe the party as an insurgent outlier that is often hostile to the social and economic policy regime, dismissive of facts and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its opponents.

The book came out just before the 2012 U.S. presidential election. It drew attention to how media coverage can create false balance and to the growing gap between political rhetoric and actual policy. The authors’ long experience in Washington and their reputation for careful, nonpartisan analysis also shaped how the book was received.

Reception was largely positive. The Economist praised the authors for thinking about ways to rescue and improve the system and called their constructive ideas worth considering. The Hill’s Juan Williams praised the work for its insights and for criticizing media practices that mask the GOP’s shift toward the far right. Michael Brissenden of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation commended the authors for moving beyond easy blame and arguing that blaming both parties equally is not accurate.

A 2016 paperback edition added new comments from the authors about events in the years after the first edition. The book’s ideas continued to attract attention, and in 2021 many readers found that its analysis matched political developments fairly well again.