BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON  |  AUG 29

Donald Trump says Hillary Clinton is a bigot.

No, Hillary retorts. Trump is a racist.

Trump charges Hillary with exploiting blacks.

Hillary claims Trump is white supremacist, who blows a dog whistle for neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan.

Trump says Hillary is crooked and should be arrested.

Hillary says Trump is profoundly dangerous.

And, so, after another day on the dusty campaign trail, the two candidates ride off into the sunset. If only there were another time zone so their performances could go on even longer. Wait. What about Guam and American Samoa?

Thanks to 24-hour, unbridled modern media, however, the mud slinging is just a click or a glance away.

And when Donald and Hillary quit shooting at each other, the quiet doesn’t last. The void is filled by their surrogates, sitting in high chairs, appropriately enough, on television news sets bellowing well into the late hours on any talk show that will have them, which is most.

Clinton advocate David Plouffe just used a Sunday talk show to call Trump a psychopath. The exchanges never stop. If there is a lull in the vitriol of the candidates and their surrogates take a breath, the media pundits lower the bar of bad behavior even further. Hillary is a con artist, they say. What Trump says is “bullshit,” (sorry, Mom) says another. Columnist Kathleen Park made caustic references to Trump’s physical virility. Even the tempered and sedate C-Span; yes, C-Span, has had to put a 3-second delay on its public guests to prevent the slinging of obscenities.

It’s all bizarre. Easily the strangest political phenomenon in modern memory. Candidates for the Presidency of the United States acting like oversized ground hogs furiously digging their way to deeper subterranean levels of political depravity, their antics cheered on and amplified by a social and traditional media conglomerate fighting over the profits that such behavior produces. It is all a spectacle not seen in America in almost 200 years, if you use the widely accepted Jackson-Adams-Clay contest in 1824 as the closest comparison.

Here’s the biggest problem if not already apparent: It is not so much the campaigns, or the political parties, or this election cycle, or even the presidency, that are in danger of irreparable harm. It is the country and our system of self-governance.

The impact is not ephemeral or transient. This is not some academic exercise for the amusement of the Washington punditry and professional political class.

This phenomenon flows into the lives of real people, a lot of them, who one could assume, are still angry and frustrated, but now growing more afraid of what the system has wrought. As former Republican Leader Bob Michel pointed out years ago, one of the reasons our government is so dysfunctional is that campaigns never cease. They become the environment in which governing takes place.

Survey research conducted by the Winston Group and other experts has confirmed over and over again that people do not believe they have access to the system of government anymore and do not believe those that do have access are serving the public interest. People don’t believe in the American dream and they do not believe their children will be better off than they. They have been angry for a long time. Now the anger is morphing into fear and disillusionment.

Columnist Dana Milbank, who refers to himself as center-left (chuckle, chuckle), got it half right in another of his angry diatribes against Trump, with whom he is now inconsolably obsessed.

“This presidential election, unlike the six others I have covered, is not about party or ideology.  It’s about Trump’s threat to our tradition of self-government,” he wrote.

He’s right about the core and wrong about the cause. Trump, hopefully, is an aberration. Milbank gives Trump far too much credit for a destructive and divisive isolation in our politics and ideology over the past 25 years, a growing frustration and disillusionment among the electorate over an even longer period, and the emergence of an infotainment media complex that has completely overtaken the news business and, to no good end, transformed information. Milbank’s own newspaper proves the point in every single edition, every day, every hour, on paper and online. As far fetched as it may seem, there is legitimate reason to argue  whether “the press” deserves or warrants the protections of our Constitution. Those protections have not come easily and should not be taken lightly.

If the foundation institutions of our Republic and our society—our system of governance, our political system, and our free press— are in such a sorry state, why are we obsessing so much over a single candidate for public office, when it can be argued that the Presidency—the Executive Branch of Government—is not the branch that should be of paramount concern? The first branch of government, the lawmaking branch, after all, is the Legislative, mostly ignored and underrated.

It is also apparent that other parts of the foundation are cracking as well: Citizen education and participation in the governmental process, civil discourse and honest engagement in our daily lives, social integration, opportunity, national identity, and a strong sense of community, common values and common purpose.

The country, like so many others across the globe, is on a calamitous course. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are symptoms, not the disease. They are reflections from a polluted pond. If you throw a rock in the pond, you eliminate the reflection but only for a while. Best to drain the pond.

Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.