Don't we deserve better than this?

Did I miss the memo? When, exactly, did we give our elected officials permission to stop governing and start becoming bad actors in a poorly written play? Is everyone else really OK with this?

Yesterday, Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, a solid, moderate voice of reason in the upper house of Congress, announced he was fed up with the system and wouldn't seek re-election. He joins a growing number of disaffected legislators who have decided enough is enough. And in far too many cases, the ones who are stepping down are the ones we most desperately need – pragmatists, centrists, thoughtful people who would rather govern than preen.

And what it will leave, as surely as the Earth circles the sun, is a more sharply divided, ideologically polarized, ineffective batch of roosters and crowing hens who will make sure that nothing positive ever happens in Washington.

This is a malaise that stretches across party lines. In the last election, the Democrats were given the rare opportunity to have a real impact. With obstruction-proof majorities in both houses and a Democrat in the White House, the nation was poised for some real leadership, some real change. And what did the Democrats do? They showed why they are afraid of guns by shooting themselves, repeatedly, in the foot.

Health-care reform didn't happen, and probably won't. Yet, a significant majority, approaching 70 percent, of Americans say health-care reform is a critical need. The Democrats dithered and dallied and argued like children tugging on the last piece of taffy, and now their large majority has been lost – probably for the foreseeable future. The Republicans, for their part, contributed less than nothing to the debate, posing and posturing and proselytizing but not at any juncture coming up with any workable proposals or acceptable compromises to make health-care reform a reality.

President Obama, for his part, did nothing to rein in the absurdist wing of his party, and thus failed to produce cohesion in his majority that could have led to action. Say what you will about George Bush – he was able to keep all his horses in the corral.

Looking into the near and mid-term future, there is nothing on the horizon suggesting anything is going to improve. The Democratic majority will suffer at least the traditional mid-term losses, and may find itself losing one or both houses of Congress. If that happens, President Obama will find himself reduced to a veto-wielding naysayer, a sad caricature of the promise he showed when he was elected.

Meanwhile, the far left and far right will continue to do battle, dragging the middle into the morass and leaving the American people, most of whom are not ideologues, at the mercy of the Palinistas and the Pelosi-ites. What a theater of the absurd that will present.

We have a right to better government than this. I'm just not sure how we achieve it. While I castigate the parties and their leaders, I also view with sadness and dismay the apparent loss of the collective American intellect. Surely no one can look at Sarah Palin and the Tea Partiers and see there any redeeming qualities – a political philosophy built on the premise that government should be essentially eliminated is a complete abrogation of the lessons of history and common sense. We have become a nation of people who have abjured civic responsibility for 30 second sound bites and clever sloganeering. We have abandoned political debate for the screaming likes of Glenn Beck, Bill O'Riley and Keith Olberman – although I hope Olberman is not a dimwit in it solely for the stage presence.

Being an involved citizen is hard work. It takes a dedication to understanding and considering the complex issues of the day, and it takes a commitment to at least trying to engage in the public debate. We have become a twitter society in a world that increasingly needs essayists; we are content with the 140-character assessment of book-length issues.

People are increasingly talking about the need for a revolution. But the revolution we need is one that will take us back to the form of governance that those who crafted the Constitution envisioned – a representative democracy that honors the many, not the few, that is responsible, not politically amoral, that is resolute, not trivial. We need to marginalize the radicals at both ends of the spectrum, and vote with our intellects, not our fears. Until that happens, we get what we deserve.