Its strange looking into the US political scene from afar, but this seems to be the state of play at the moment:
The Republican Party:
Fear that by being part of government they will lose the next election.
The Democratic Party:
Fear that if they lead by governing they will lose the next election.
Therefore:
The Democratic Party extends the olive branch of bipartisanship, and the Republican Party bites their ankles.
So:
The Obama administration rather than being pushed by Democratic Party majorities to uphold its principles is dragged into the quagmire of how to preserve seats.
More concerned by the never ending election cycle than doing what it believes we have a stalemate.
This concern needs to be diluted if not poured down the sink altogether.
I always felt that the two year cycle of the House of representatives was too short, and the rotational elections of the Senate extremely strange. They appear to be designed to prevent government actually taking place.
In most major democracies elections follow a logic of:
If you are really that bad, you are all out. Its more cyclical and gives the opposition a calm period to make changes, without worrying about the election 4 or 5 years away.
I realize the initial intent was to prevent parties from doing excessive damage by threatening electoral disdain, however in this age of massive campaign expenditure even total failure can be erased by an 'inspired' advertisement campaign.
How can anyone have forgotten the last Republican majority's total failure?
Now the meme seems to be throw the incumbent out, heh, funny how the majority of incumbents are Dem's, what a stroke of genius, its all their fault, and by default in a two party system its the Republicans that will benefit.
The American Political system has much to be admired with its three branches, each designed to monitor each other.
However if one branch is more concerned about being electable, another has life membership, and an executive branch being told "why don't you solve all our problems with a magic wand", we have pretty much a stalemate.
So what we find is that now after only after a short time we are back to; OMG its another election, we have to win!
Get out the check books.
Yikes
The unelected lifetime membership lot have decided corporations are people, we haven't had time to change that, OMG were screwed!
Resulting in Democratic Governors saying that in challenging Arizona's racist immigration law the administration might be putting their seats at risk!
If fear of governing and legislating is your thing, then you wont be able to do both for long.
Fear of acting on what you believe is right is more pernicious than actually getting it wrong.
The possibility of a Republican victories in November seems to prove this last point.
The possibility that their tactics in opposition have now become the conventional wisdom of how to behave when voted out of power is worrying.
Bearing this in mind, either politicians have to change, or the system has to change, since neither are likely, that leaves the rest of us in a quandary.
If I mention third party, well we all know where that leads, sigh.
If I mention campaign finance reform, its definitely not the time now; haven't you heard there is an election to win.
If I mention a cyclical election system, then I am told that this would be very bad especially if we were to lose the next election.
So we have the status quo.
Basically that leaves one year in every four when you can expect to actually do something positive [or fuck up], that's really not much, so I suppose we better start writing our proposed legislative agenda for 2012 now.
Sorry about the rambling, but I am not surprised by the current grumblings that government is bad, especially when neither the system nor the participants permit it to actually happen.
So to the politicians concerned about losing their seats if they govern, you may lose anyway by failing to act, how would you like to fail?
By doing what you believe is right? You never know the voters might be impressed and vote you in again.
or
By being concerned about your job prospects?
I say have some water with that concern, otherwise you will be looking for another job soon enough.