America's 'Seinfeld' election fades to black

It's possible that the best Attytood posts are the ones that I never get around to writing. You'd probably agree, since that also means that you don't have to read them. In recent days, I've gone round and round on whether to produce what might have been a "C+" term paper on the abysmal state of American politics going into the 2014 mid-terms, but I couldn't bring myself to write it. How does one tell a story with no heroes, no suspense, no dramatic, swelling music -- just the slow march of electoral livestock being driven to their unavoidable electoral slaughterhouse?

It was a "Seinfeld" election, a show about nothing. Ironically, the TV sitcom -- despite its branding -- was often elaborately plotted toward a gut punch of a punch line. But the U.S. electorate in 2014 is still looking for its car in the mall parking lot somewhere in the swamps of Jersey, still waiting for a table at the Chinese restaurant in 5, 10 minutes.

Blame the Republicans -- who planned for two years to run against Obamacare and when Obamacare worked, said, OK, then we'll run against ISIS terrorists with Ebola flooding our pourous borders...that'll work. Blame the Democrats, the cowardly lions of American politics who bravely turned their tail and fled their own record -- even a record of millions more with health insurance, slow but steady job growth and plunging energy prices -- and failed to stand for what their party allegedly believes in. Blame the media -- which devoted hundreds of hours of frenetic coverage to a domestic Ebola scare that claimed the life of one just person (and a visitor at that) on U.S. soil, but which had nothing to say about why fast-food workers need food stamps to live, or why America has the highest incarceration rate in the industrialized world. And yes, blame the millions of Americans who won't go out and vote, even as they avidly weigh in on Rene Zellweger's new look or the hotness of #AlexFromTarget.

But also blame the system -- the system that has allowed anonymous donors to dump tens of millions of dollars into the closest Senate races at the last minute, that allows high-tech gerrymandering which means that by some measures only 11 out of 435 congressional races were truly contested this year, and which means a heavily Republican House even as Democrats win a majority of the votes, and a system in which a viewer can see 11 blaring, mostly fact free political commercials during a local Philadelphia newscast, and zero actual news coverage of politics.

Now I'll outsource to one of the best pieces I've seen on this election, by E.J. Dionne in today's Washington Post. He wrote:

In "The Cynic," a new biography of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, New Republic writer Alec MacGillis cites former GOP senator Bob Bennett recalling McConnell's comments to his party colleagues at a winter retreat in 2009, at the dawn of Obama's presidency:

"Mitch said, 'We have a new president with an approval rating in the 70 percent area. We do not take him on frontally. We find issues where we can win, and we begin to take him down, one issue at a time. We create an inventory of losses, so it's Obama lost on this, Obama lost on that. And we wait for the time when the image has been damaged to the point where we can take him on.' "

MacGillis aptly summarized the approach: "In other words, wait out Americans' hopefulness in a dire moment for the country until it curdles to disillusionment." This is the central cause of the dysfunction that leaves voters so disheartened. It should be rebuked rather than vindicated at the polls.

Like Hemingway wrote, isn't it pretty to think so. Instead, that rank cynicism will surely be rewarded tomorrow. I read a piece today by Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine which said that after the GOP drew up such grossly favorable district lines in the early years of this decade, the Democrats gave up hope of getting anything done legislatively until the new maps come out. But he made a mistake in saying that would be 2020 -- that's actually just the year of the next census. Redistricting won't take hold until 2022 -- eight years from now. Republicans, I'm sure, don't mind waiting.

But can we? Can we wait for eight more years with no action on a minimum wage that forces millions of Americans to live below the poverty line? Can we wait eight years on reform of a system in which 95 percent of the income gains flow to the top 1 Percent of Americans? Can we watch carbon levels in our atmosphere rise, unabated, for close to a decade with no action on climate change?

America is a nation that needs revolutionary change, and the only safe, fair and workable way for that change to come is through the ballot box. But it can't happen when the system is rigged for a small oligarchy, and it can't happen when the parties and the media conspires to broadcast a political sit-com about nothing. Somebody needs to find the remote and change this channel, and they need to change it way before 2022.