Trouble is, there isn't a third party. We're stuck with the same old same old, and it's bringing us to our knees.
... Step back from events this month, this year or even this decade, and a more ominous portrait comes into focus.
It shows an American economy under ever-increasing competitive pressure, demographic trends making those pressures more acute and a voting public facing repeated disappointment as it yearns for better times.
That disappointment may represent the long-term political consequence of a financial crisis and recession that has forced the nation to finally come to terms with its economic vulnerability.
For a generation, “our economy has been, for the majority of people, a slow-growth economy,” said Robert D. Reischauer, who was the director of the Congressional Budget Office in the early 1990s. “But our standards of living have improved much more, due to some factors that can’t and won’t be repeated.”
Republicans felt the voters’ wrath in 2008, as Democrats did last year. There is no sign of a Morning in America in 2012, or anytime soon.
“We’re going to see turbulence” in more elections, Mr. Reischauer concluded. “It’s a very grim picture.”... John Harwood, New York Times
This doesn't mean Obama will be voted out or, much worse, that Congress will change over.
... Given the advantages of incumbency, even sluggish growth and a glacial decline in the 9.1 percent unemployment rate could preserve the current divided government. ...
... “It’s a problem for everybody in office,” said Tom Davis, a former chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee who describes himself as happily retired from the House.
“The political system, Republican or Democrat, over the last decade has delivered two failed wars, an economic meltdown, 20 percent of homes underwater, stagnant wages,” he said. “Voters look at the political system as a whole as just not giving them anything.”
