Hey, we’re a 3-9 football team right now

“Unemployment remaining unchanged at 9.5 percent and the loss of over 130,000 jobs once again confirms that President Obama’s economic policies have failed to create sustainable job growth.”

This is what passes for statesmanship these days, I guess. The quote is from Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele.

I get it. He has to say something bad about President Obama, because Obama is a Democrat, and Steele is a Republican. Republicans have to say bad things about Democrats. Democrats, in turn, have to say bad things about Republicans.

What gets me about this statement – Republicans in this case have done everything they can to not only block the president from being able to enact his economic agenda, but as part of their strategy to do so they’ve also made a concerted effort to pottymouth the hell out of the economy, which, hey, has to be working, since today’s unemployment numbers had been predicted earlier in the week when we got wind of consumer-confidence numbers that show that consumers are anything but confident right now.

I know the toothpaste is long, long since out of the tube on this one, but … can’t we just call a truce on this endless stream of back-and-forth on trying to make the other side look bad for the purposes of political gain?

I’m aware that it’s not just Republicans who play this game, so don’t accuse me of being unironically partisan on this one. Democrats piled on George W. Bush just as Republicans piled on Bill Clinton. I’m sure the Whigs before they went out engaged in their own piling on back in the day.

Just for craps and giggles, what if we all agreed that for the, say, 18 months between Election Night and the next congressional primaries, we all advocated for what we wanted done, worked toward studying the landscape, looking at what we’re doing right, trying to get at what we might be doing wrong, devising strategies to approach solutions that right wrongs and don’t in the process also wrong rights, then work toward legislating and codifying those solutions into public policy?

It frightens me to think of what would happen. We might actually get something done that we could look at as progress.

Think of how much time, energy, effort and money is spent cranking out press releases and calling press conferences and blustering on Fox and MSNBC about everything and nothing. Being a sportswriter at my heart, I can tend toward waxing poetic about how politics is a lot like football, with the runup to the big game on Saturday or Sunday involving a lot of jawing back and forth and press conferences and endless speculation by the hacks and squawkers about what’s going to happen. The difference between the two is that in football they actually play a game on Saturday or Sunday where the two teams have to put up or shut up, while in politics, well, even the losing team isn’t the losing team, with the help of the spin doctors and the filibuster.

So the drum beats on and on and on and on and on and … meanwhile, we’ve let our country go straight to hell, sending our good-paying manufacturing jobs overseas, and giving the companies that hollowed out our economic foundation tax breaks for their troubles, while engaging in two nonsensical nation-building wars that have nearly bankrupted the national treasury.

Going back to the sports world, specifically football, where the coaches like to say things like, If our record is 3-9, that means that we probably were a 3-9 team, hey, America, it doesn’t take much to figure out from looking at the indicators, from the test scores of our kids in school to our declining life expectancy to our trade deficit to our recent record in international police actions, that we’re probably about a 3-9 team right now, and we’ve been that for a while.

We can keep changing coaches to try to get it right, and I expect we will, alternating as we tend to do between Democrats and Republicans trying to get it right. But until we change the fundamentals of the approach, I submit, we’re going to keep playing 3-9 football.