America’s political class can be rightly called a great many things: venal, corrupt, underhanded, lugubrious, and smarmy among them. But they are also usually very smart people who are capable of reading the electorate like an open book and who survive by giving the people exactly what they really want. And that usually amounts to more of the same old politics that we claim to hate, but that we relish in our hearts.

Every election cycle we act as though we just cannot stand another year of the negative campaigning and attack ads, and we pretend to be appalled at the number and viciousness of those ads that are produced. “Give us more substance,” we say, and then we settle down in front of the tube, the radio, or the monitor and lap up the latest ad that accuses the candidate that is running against our guy of being a liar, a cheat, or a fraud!

We claim that we want our politicians to work to get things done in Washington, that we would like to see less of the hyper-partisanship that so often paralyzes government, and that denies us the public service of well qualified people in judgeships, as U.S. Attorneys, or as Cabinet members. We say that we want the two parties to put aside their differences and work together…right up until a politician actually does that. Then we turn on that politician as a turncoat, not because he has done anything that shocks his conscience, but because he has not towed some ideological or Party line on an issue. We don’t really want to see any cooperation, what we want to see is the other side capitulate to our desires and for “our” guys to vote in lockstep with the Party, come hell or high water.

We pretend that we want to hear new ideas to old problems, but the moment someone actually has a new idea, we go ballistic! If someone says we should allow younger citizens to privately invest some of their Social Security withholding the public has a hissy fit; “No!” we scream, “that would bankrupt the system!” But many of us never stop to think that the system is already a bankrupt Ponzi scheme, which is not guaranteed to even be close to solvent by the time we are expecting to draw benefits from it; no, we are too busy trying to cling to the same old discredited solutions to the same problems. Schools failing the students they are meant to serve? Change the system, so long as it doesn’t include vouchers, school choice of any kind, and fat raise for the “underpaid” teachers toiling in the educational trenches!

We like to claim that we don’t want anymore of the same old Beltway regulars in charge, because we see what they have accomplished for us. But we go crazy when someone without a Beltway mentality threatens to rise to national political prominence. Take Gov. Sarah Palin as the prime example: this is a person who has no experience playing the Beltway Games, who has been busy working for her state as governor, and who has been getting good results. But because she is not a polished media product, and because she isn’t running around currying the favor of either the media elite, nor the Beltway elite, pundits on both sides of the political aisle have declared her to “unprepared” for the Vice Presidency. “Why, she hasn’t met with any leaders of foreign nations, and she didn’t even have a passport until recently…so she is unqualified”, says the left. From the right, the noted political thinker Kathleen Parker has decided that Governor Palin is unqualified because she wasn’t smooth and polished in her interviews with Charlie Gibson, Katie Couric, and Sean Hannity. According to Parker, that is reason enough for Palin to drop out of the race some 40+ days before the election, effectively ending any chance that John McCain had to win the election, and that she should use her youngest son as an excuse to run away from the fight. What the left doesn’t get is that many of us here in the American hinterlands don’t have passports, haven’t visited a lot of foreign nations, and haven’t met many foreign leaders. And as governor, when would it have been appropriate for Mrs. Palin to have met with Kim Jong Il, Vladimir Putin, Nikolas Sarkozy, or Gordon Brown? Her job as governor meant that she dealt with Congressional politicians and state/local pols; not trotting the globe like Bill Richardson is prone to do. And what Mrs. Parker doesn’t get is that the last thing we want right now is another smooth talking politician, with prepackaged answers, and who is seeking the approval of the Gibsons, Courics, and Olbermans of the world!

But the professional politicians promise to give us all we ask for, but specialize in giving us exactly what we expect. They promise us change, but they give us the same old stuff in a package the screams NEW & IMPROVED!!!!  And we buy it, because at heart way too many of us want the same old same and have come to expect and accept it with no questions asked.

I had a political science professor as our class this question one day, and it applies to all of us: If our politicians are corrupt, venal, lying backstabbers, whose fault is that? Is it the fault of the politicians for being those things, or is the fault of the people who elect them? Likewise, if the politicians continue to give us the same old spit, just on a different day who’s really at fault; the politicians who provide the spit, or the electorate that laps it up?

In all honesty, we can’t blame the politicians…they’re just giving the people what they want!