You'll want to look hard beneath headlines like "Bush Approval Falls in Nationwide Polls" (the New York Times) to notice what's missing.

 Which is? I'll spoil it for you: The thing that's missing is any sense of what the people want their president to do in order to earn their approval.

 We don't like what he's doing -- and we don't know exactly what he ought to be doing.

 Same with Congress, which had an approval rating, in the New York Times/CBS poll, lower still than Bush's. "They're not getting anything done," one Republican homemaker complained to a reporter. " ... [T]hey're forgetting the basic needs of the people." And those needs are ... ?

 If the lady elucidated, it's not reported. The unspoken question hangs there: The basic needs of the people are ? ?

 We really can't leave it at that, because polls of this sort underline a particular fragility in contemporary American politics; that is, our habit -- encouraged by the media -- of referring to the political process all our disaffections, unhappinesses, dilemmas and so forth; then, expressing more disaffection, unhappiness, etc., concerning whatever outcome the political process produces. We don't know exactly what we want, but we'll know it when we don't see it -- which is normally.

 For seven decades -- since the New Deal -- growing numbers of Americans have ascribed to the federal government the power to make them happy or at least content, or if not content, then moderately prosperous, and if not moderately prosperous, then secure in the knowledge of a safety net beneath their beds and lives.

 All this is what we've come to think of as the American way of life. We want our leaders to defend that way of life. We're just not entirely sure of the best defensive weapons to use.

 The American way of life is a beguiling mixture: some rugged individualism, some thumb-sucking dependency. At regular intervals, we elect leaders to use some combination of those formulas. We really seem not to care which. We're interested in ends, not means. The ends are (see above) happiness and prosperity. We assume Congress is laboring constantly toward these ends. When all we hear instead is charges and counter-charges, accusations and rebuttals, we assume nothing is going on. Continued...