Bayh echoed that selfsame poll when he suggested the only way to "fix" Congress might be to vote all the jackals, special interest shills and fringe nutballs out of both parties, and then vote in an entirely new cadre of untainted humans, real reformers, people who know how to work together and make things happen, sans the bickering and acid and hookers and handouts.
You can see the problem right there. Who the hell might that be, exactly? Where do we find people like that? Do they even exist? Have we not already established the fact that American politics, as it is now designed, largely draws freaks and gladhanders, shysters and fools?
One of the ways to make politics appeal to fair-thinking, good-souled, college-educated intellects would be to start with something even mildly radical -- like, say, campaign finance reform, perhaps disallowing vicious corporations to buy and sell a given candidate like a brainless toy. Yes, that might help. Hello, Supreme Court? Here is your giant middle finger. Love, America.
Which brings us, naturally, to President Obama, quite possibly the least freakish, slippery, pre-devoured politician to ever grace the Oval Office -- which, in truth, sort of baffled everyone, in the beginning. "What the hell is a smart, attuned, deeply intelligent, meta-calm community organizer dude doing wanting to run the country, in that ocean of snakes?" millions of us who voted for him asked in wondrous, mystical disbelief. "How long can such a person possibly last in that rare, impossible state of utopian goodness before being sucked into the hate-filled congressional vortex?" we added, fearfully.
Answer: not long, apparently. To be sure, Obama went in with a rather astonishing set of credentials as a masterful uniter, a capable compromiser, someone who could find the intelligent middle ground in a hurricane. This, to many of us, was the real change he would bring to Congress -- not wild organic liberalism and peacenik silliness, but more of a simple, calm, effective reversal of the utterly vile, hyper-polarized, we-hate-everything extremism that Bush so disgustingly embodied.
(Oh btw, the Bush family? Total freaks. So cloistered, inbred and twitchy, they were perhaps freaks of the worst kind: freaks of the mundane and the mediocre, the violent and the low. But you already knew that.)
Yep. Sure did.
All of which can lead you to an utterly depressing, defeatist view of America, wherein you might say the worst affliction we suffer isn't the horrible economy, job losses, botched health care reform, war, housing collapse or Hannah Montana. Rather, it's a snarling, hydra-headed government led by fundamentalist tea-party fringe nutballs from the right and weak-kneed whiners from the left, full of sound and fury, inspiring absolutely nothing. Or is that overstating things just a little?
Probably. Then again, and more disturbingly, maybe not.
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