SILVERTON, CO – The man in the coffee shop had the look of a no-nonsense Westerner. A retired architect, he told me that he had lived in the mountains for the past few years and that like most Americans, he was appalled at what was going on in Washington. Cheerfully admitting to being a political liberal, he nonetheless agreed that America’s financial woes were due to government profligacy, not a lack of tax revenue. He acknowledged that the nation’s credit rating was downgraded because Congress had not enacted serious spending cuts. There’s plenty of common ground here, I thought. That...