BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

My daughter was in Canada recently and went into a gift shop to buy a souvenir.  She handed the clerk U.S. dollars and the clerk called the manager over to get the most recent exchange rate. “We don’t take American money anymore,” the manager said. “Things are so unpredictable down there, we never know what the dollar is worth.”

Early in August, 5,000 Federal Aviation workers were thrown out of work without pay, along with thousands of construction workers because Congress couldn’t get its act together and reauthorize the agency. Workers were left without income to pay mortgages, car payments and buy groceries.

Over at the Postal Service, 120,000 employes are in fear of losing their jobs in an economy with already 14 million looking for work, because the Congress couldn’t make any decisions about Saturday closings or higher postal rates.

And back in Canada, the government has just sealed a trade deal with Mexico that will likely hurt U.S. trade balances, while the President sits on negotiated trade agreements with Korea, Columbia and Panama.

Before Congress recessed for August, the lawmakers and the President brought our economy to its knees again in an inexcusable display of partisan and ideological brinkmanship that resulted in a downgrading of U.S. credit and left the economy and anxious Americans still stuck in dangerously uncertain times.  

Meanwhile, the President and Congress have failed to produce an energy policy, slow the decline of public education, secure the electrical grid, strengthen cyber security, repair a dilapidated transportation infrastructure, or reach agreement on critical health care and retirement issues. Congress failed to even adopt a budget last year for the first time in 40 years. The government is being funded year to year by patchwork, stopgap, bulging appropriation bills that don’t meet the Legislative Branch’s most fundamental responsibilities to oversee federal programs. There’s still no decision on what to do with 11 million illegal immigrants. 

I paint this picture in response to one of the most absurd statements on the American condition I have ever seen in print, from a columnist I admire, Charles Krauthammer.

He wrote on August 12: “Of all the endlessly repeated conventional wisdom in today’s Washington, the most lazy, stupid and ubiquitous is that our politics is broken. On the contrary. Our political system is working well.”

Krauthammer is not the only one in the media redefining political normalcy.  Andrea (Orphan Annie) Tantaros said on Fox news the other day that things aren’t so bad. “The sun will come up tomorrow,” she assured us. Tony Blankley, one of the best minds in the business called those on Wall Street and in Europe who saw the debt-ceiling debacle as a failure of the process “gullible.” He said if they weren’t careful, those promoting the prospect of government dysfunction would erode public confidence in government. What public confidence in government is there left to erode?

People in the media, on the right and left, have an altitude problem. They view the world from 30,000 feet (Blankley about 10,000 feet higher), their head high above the clouds, where they can think and pontificate without the intrusion of the noises below, the sounds of people having a tough time making it from day to day. Up there, the pundits have no sense or time for detail. They see the big picture, but not the elements of it. Their objectives are on a grand, theoretical scale and always just a few years from reality. 

Krauthammer and Blankley were defending the brinkmanship of the political right in their crusade for spending reduction, as distinguished from deficit reduction, in the debt-ceiling circus that has yet to fold its tents. Commentators on the left were making mirror-image arguments in defense of brinkmanship on their side of the political spectrum, too.  

I suppose Krauthammer and the others believe for now it is better to lose a battle or two in anticipation of winning the big prize in November of 2012—staying pure for the next coming of one-party rule that has served us so well in its previous iterations. Unfortunately, while those on the right and the left continue their search for the Holy Grail, government continues to fail in its most basic responsibilities.

Krauthammer would have you make a distinction between the political process and the governing process, but he is wrong. It is a difference without distinction.  The political process is integral to the governing process. Our politics is supposed to produce our policy. The political process is not supposed to end in one side winning an ideological debate. It is supposed to end in governance, in decisions and actions that serve the best interests of the people governed, in making their lives better, whether it is by limiting government or expanding it.   

Krauthammer’s defense of vibrant and defining political debate is certainly justified. It’s too bad it can’t be more civil, but our Founders were pretty clear about the latitude we all should have in exercising free speech, free press and free assembly. It is also clear, however, that our Founders created landmark institutions of governance to bring political discourse to a positive conclusion.  Politics in its rudimentary form is no more than a way to make decisions. It stands to reason then that if the government is a failure, so is the political process.

Krauthammer and Blankley can insist that the system isn’t broken. I would bet the millions upon millions of those being victimized by its dysfunction don’t agree and I hope they aren’t just being written off as damage collateral to the more pressing crusade for ideological domination.