I've been pondering the modern, twenty-first century version of politics for months now. (That's, of course, what happens when primaries and general elections are interminably long and arduous.) I've thought a lot about the ads, the debate tactics, the way that the system is set up, and various and sundry other concepts. Of course, it doesn't help that I've been on a hefty reading diet of politically charged books, papers, and blogs, but what can I say? I'm a politics junkie.

However, I'm becoming increasingly disaffected with the whole politics situation in this country. Perhaps it was the length of the primaries (which felt as though they would NEVER EVER END) or the vitriol that we hear daily from the general election, but I'm just getting tired of all the major candidates from both parties.

And it's not entirely their fault. (Well, it's mostly their fault, but I digress.) The blame lays on many different and disparate groups. It's the two-party system's fault for stifling dissent or third-party candidates. It's the media's fault for focusing on the mechanics of elections rather than the substance. But most of all it's our fault, for gobbling up the gunk they feed us and smiling like idiot children.

I think it's telling how both major presidential candidates have completely turned their back on everything they once stood for, spouting talking points and rhetoric that's ultimately empty and vapid, or as Shakespeare put it in Macbeth, 'Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing'. Frankly, it's become even more of what Ralph Nader described in his book Crashing the Party: Taking on the Corporate Government in an Age of Surrender - I think this assessment of the current political situation is especially adroit.

Throughout the campaign, the media obsessed over the tactics of the candidates and other horse-race aspects such as the polls, endorsements, stumbles, momentum, staff turnover, and the like. This has become a professional addiction and a contagious one at that, providing mind-numbing renditions.

The saddest thing is that these politicians didn't always used to be that way - or, at the very least, they used to pretend to be different. I mean, listen to this quote from John McCain back in the 2000 election:

We have squandered the public trust. We have placed our personal and partisan interest before the national interest, earning the public's contempt for our poll-driven policies, our phony posturing, the lies we call spin, and the damage control we substitute for progress. And we defend the campaign finance system that is nothing less than an elaborate influence-peddling scheme in which both parties conspire to stay in office by selling the country to the highest bidder.

It's a shame that a person who sounded so principled could, eight years later, be one of the worst offenders of the very things he decries in that statement. Regardless of party, everything in national politics has become a story of power brokers, who get what they want regardless of the way it steamrolls over the normal citizen.

Consequently, my distaste for the big players of national politics has made me think a lot about the Concord Principles - some essentials for national elections that have been soundly ignored since Ralph Nader proposed them from Dartmouth in New Hampshire. (These Principles can be read here.) The things that most surely stand out to me are these:

A growing and grave imbalance between the often converging power of Big Business, Big Government and the citizens of this country has seriously damaged our democracy and weakened our ability to correct this imbalance. We lack the mechanisms of civic power. We need a modern tool box for redeeming our democracy by strengthening our capacity for self- government and self-reliance both as individuals and as a community of citizens. Our 18th century democratic rights need retooling for the proper exercise of our responsibilities as citizens in the 21st century.

Big Business and Big Government are pretty much best buddies at this point; I'm ashamed that it's become that way. But what are we going to do to try and change our politics to improve the situation in the national setting? Mr. Nader gives us some concise and meaningful changes that I believe should be implemented, even though they never will:

• a binding none-of-the-above option on the ballot;
• term limitations, 12 years and out;
• public financing of campaigns through well-promoted voluntary taxpayer checkoffs on tax returns;
• easier voter registration and ballot access rules;
• state-level binding initiative, referendum, and recall authority, a non-binding national referendum procedure; and
• a repeal of the runaway White House/Congressional Pay Raises back to 1988 levels -- a necessary dose of humility to the politicians.

Genius. Will it happen? No. Can I wish it would?

Heavens yes.

Things are broken, and with the two big parties, things are going to stay broken - unless we stand up and make it change. We have to, in the words of a great man, stand where we are - and lift.