MARK SMITH MORE COLUMNS Advertisement

Call me a principled but unhappy voter, a reference to the column penned by Ed Tenney elsewhere on today's editorial pages.

In many ways this may be a historic election, if we assume that Barack Obama succeeds in his quest for the presidency. I hardly need to point out the obvious. Even if he doesn't win, he will have led one of the two major parties on a fully valid campaign for the office, again for the first time in history.

The thought of John McCain winning is almost too grim for words. John and his Chatty Cathy running mate.

You betcha!

Ye gods.

And somehow I am frightfully bored by the whole thing. I'm not even sure why.

It's not just the blizzard of self-serving e-mails that comes my way each day here: "Obama supported the Spanish Inquisition!" "McCain plans lovefest with Jane Fonda!" I've got to assume that the drones who put these press releases together are those who never got jobs at the National Enquirer.

Maybe it dismays me to see the most recent crop of Republican candidates, those who have no real sense of the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower or even, God forbid, Nixon and Reagan.

Did we really decide that with the collapse of the communist bloc that history had stopped in its tracks?

Maybe it's realizing the truth of what Ted Koppel said years ago on "Nightline."

One of his guests had brought up the usual high-school civics nonsense about the three branches of government: the executive, the legislative and the judicial.

No, said Koppel, the three branches that control government are the judiciary, the bureaucracy and the lobbyists.

One has only to look at the recent uproar and outrage about earmarks to appreciate at least the importance of the last of the three.

Where the bureaucrats are concerned, one needs the lever of Archimedes to boost them off their fannies and persuade them to even think about doing anything truly innovative.

We long-ago reached a point at which no one from the top down can simply take responsibility and get something done. (See the judiciary.)

Unfortunately, even the high-level commentators on the networks, cable and otherwise, simply go along with the given: the executive, the legislative, the judiciary.

Well, that's OK, batting .300 is enough to make you a headliner in Major League Baseball.

Yammer yammer yammer about health care, or yammer yammer yammer about the pupfish, the idea that something might actually change is virtually beyond our imagination.

Whoever wins, what is not going to happen is a new 100 days of the New Deal, when Congress demanded changes to the political firmament and began to nudge its way into the 20th century.

I never get the gut sense that Obama is going to strike sparks with the government, and McCain is more likely to take a nap.

Meanwhile, there is that mass of voters who will look only at their singular interest and ignore the fact that the nation requires a national point of view for there to be any progress.

I'm voting against abortion, or marijuana use, or stopping the detention center, or lowering the drinking age to 18. And meanwhile their candidate might as well be proposing above-ground nuclear testing and a hearty dose of strontium 90. But he's against lowering the drinking age, so that's all right!

Forty years ago, after I came back from 20 months in Vietnam, I spent several years with the antiwar movement. I didn't vote once. But I probably had a greater involvement in the political world than many of those who did -- and I had a heck of a lot more fun.