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" The 2012 election will cost 6 billion dollars. The least we deserve is a good show. The selection of Paul Ryan as Republican VP nominee gives 2012 a much-needed jolt of dramatic energy. Finally, the big show has a big theme: America in crisis. Obama&amp;#039;s argument will be that the crisis in America was caused by Republican initiatives during the Bush years and in the current Congress, and that only Democrats are responsible enough to oversee a recovery. Romney and Ryan will argue that only their radical proposals for an extreme individualism, ending virtually all government support except for those currently over the age of fifty, will lead to American renewal. Even though the idea of American decline is demonstrably nonsense, crisis at least gives the election shape. Not coincidentally, American television is full of a crop of new shows that have predicted the theme of the current election. America in crisis. If you watch television, or the news, it&amp;#039;s probably the story you hear and see most. Not that either television or politics can stomach to give us the real American crisis. They both indulge the old-fashioned crises from the past. In real life: Obama pretends we&amp;#039;re in 2008, as if he&amp;#039;s just been given a chance to fix things, and Romney pretends we&amp;#039;re in 1988, by proposing hardly updated supply-side economics. Both candidates have to pretend we&amp;#039;re in the past, or else they would have to admit their responsibility for the mess. In television, the nostalgia is more indirect. The Newsroom is a show based on an antique conflict: ratings versus integrity. As many have pointed out, this debate existed in American television. In 1970. The current crisis in American cable, which The Newsroom never deals with, is the furious polarization of political ideas, which rewards commentators with high ratings for insanely extreme political opinions, until their own released demons eventually consume them (see: Olbermann, Limbaugh, et al.). The current crisis is screaminess.  The joke in Veep is that she&amp;#039;s so close to power. If only that were the case.  Aaron Sorkin isn&amp;#039;t the only person to use false crisis as narrative bait; he&amp;#039;s just the best at it. All of the political shows use more or less the same trick. In Veep, the show&amp;#039;s main joke is that Julia Louis-Dreyfus&amp;#039;s character is so close to power. If only she were the president, the gag runs, all of her ideas would come to fruition, and she would make the huge decisions she&amp;#039;s so clearly ready to make. Armando Iannucci, the genius behind the best political television show in history, The Thick of It, is a Brit and has, I believe, confused an American president with a British prime minister. He assumes that the president, like the prime minister, is the guy who can do what he wants, just because he&amp;#039;s commander-in-chief of the U.S. military. But the current president has to practically kill himself just to prevent Congress from welching on America&amp;#039;s national debt. It would be great if the American president was the power, if he could do what he wanted \u2014 things in Washington might get done, and at least we would know whom to blame. But we all know the president is one flailing actor in an increasingly vacuous drama. The president just doesn&amp;#039;t have that kind of authority anymore.  Only The Campaign is living in our own time. It hits you over the head with its direct political references \u2014 &amp;quot;The Motch brothers&amp;quot; instead of the Koch brothers, and the line &amp;quot;Big Money is running politics in America.&amp;quot; American politics is at the point where gross-out comedy is the only appropriate genre: vainglorious idiots in the grips of systems they don&amp;#039;t understand, under the power of immense sums of cash. Unfortunately, the U.S. election is not a joke. It&amp;#039;s not a light affair. People sense the looming danger, too. According to one recent survey, 61 percent of Americans feel an imminent sense of catastrophe, but only 15 percent have a plan to deal with it. The sense of brokenness is becoming clearer and more inescapable in the post-hope world opened up after the failure of Obama&amp;#039;s fundamental promise, which was to transform the nature of American politics. Politics has indeed been transformed, but by the Supreme Court, and not in a way anyone voted for.  This past year, Daily Show writer Kevin Bleyer published Me the People, which jokingly proposed a new Constitution. Slate took up the challenge and what began as a joke eventually came up with some pretty serious ideas \u2014 excellent ideas. actually. Such as a single six-year term for all elected federal positions. Such as strict spending limits for campaigns. Such as setting fines along a sliding scale by income. Of course, everybody is sort of kidding. But where there is mock anger, there will eventually be real anger. The sacredness of America&amp;#039;s founding documents is still heralded across the country, but for how much longer? Even Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is down on the system: &amp;quot;I would not look to the U.S. Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012,&amp;quot; she said on Egyptian television. The magnificent ancient machinery of American government appears to be broken just at the moment when it most needs to work. Television and politics shove the problems that no longer matter into our faces. (And, incidentally, it&amp;#039;s not that the problems of the past have been resolved. They&amp;#039;ve just disappeared. As T.S. Eliot wrote, &amp;quot;Time is no healer. The patient is no longer here.&amp;quot;)  Our own problems will no doubt fade into the problems of the future as well, one way or the other. Neither entertainers nor the political class seem able to face up to the brokenness of our own time. How broken do things have to get before they can? Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a15323/the-campaign-politics-2012-11650819/>