But what do we fight for? How about idealism, fairness and equality?

"I think Washington in general is unpopular, the president and congress, because we seem dysfunctional and we are dysfunctional." - Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), on NBC's Meet the Press, Sunday, June 22, 2014

In the American experience, our country's forebearers have left us a legacy of knowing who and what we are against. From religious persecution to the British, from slavery to Jim Crow, we fight. That is our story. We find purpose in the fight, so we agree on very little and the few policies where we find consensus are devoured by the vermin that infect the political beast. Just ask deposed House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) what it's like to wake up with the fleas with whom you've gone to bed, crawling under your skin.

The Republicans like to draw a picture of Obama being the extreme, and then there's everyone else, or as John Boehner likes to call them, "the American people." (Someone should to a count of how many times the Speaker uses that phrase when he actually means the Republican base, but I guess they're American people, too - just not all the American people.) Inside the current dynamics of his party, that may be true.

"We are now operating in the Obama Republican Party," Jon Lerner, a Republican consultant, admitted to the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza, recently. "Obama’s lurch to the left on size-of-government issues has created an aggressive Republican reaction..."

That is, of course, an oversimplification.

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Study ranks state governments on transparency, corruption

To many, “government integrity” is, and has always been, an oxymoron. We rarely expect those who we hire to serve us from whichever office, chamber or desk, to remain, or retain, the commitment to honest, open government they may have promised when they were asking for our vote. Occasionally, in times of particularly lean trust in the leaders we have, we set aside our cynicism and look to a candidate who says the right things about restoring that trust, and we sweep them into office, hoping that this time, it will be different.

But there are no guarantees. If the candidates we elect create new, government accountability laws, there is no evidence they will either enforce them against their cronies, or follow them themselves. “[T]he states with the worst reputations and sorriest histories of political corruption face the most public pressure to clean up their acts, so they pass new laws and strengthen old ones to create a framework of integrity,” wrote Andy Shaw, president and CEO of the Better Government Association, a non-profit government watchdog group based in Chicago.

“That doesn’t mean that all of the public officials in those states are following the new rules or obeying the new laws,” he continued, “—you can lead a horse to water…etc., etc.—but at least they know what’s expected.”

Shaw was explaining the motivation behind, and usefulness of, his group’s third BGA-Alper Services Integrity Index.

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