Regardless of where you stand in the healthcare debate the one thing everyone can no doubt agree on is that it has been one of the uglier episodes in American political life for many, many years. It’s been far uglier than the previous champion, the Clinton’s healthcare fight fifteen years ago. This time, all of the back and forths, amendments, positions, loyalties, rationalizations, and embarrassments have been right there in the spotlight. Left/Right Ideology aside, however, there is a more serious reason that it’s been like an oozing, open sore in the public eye for almost a year.

When the Antiquities Act of 1906 gave President Theodore Roosevelt the power to proclaim parcels of land as national monuments, he took full advantage of the new power. Within six months he had proclaimed four- Devils Tower, Wyoming, on September 24 and El Morro, New Mexico, Montezuma Castle, Arizona, and Petrified Forest, Arizona. It was the start of a century long trend of power moving inexorably from Capital Hill to the White House far in excess of not only the spirit of the Constitution, but its very words. The Founding Fathers had been famously paranoid of anything resembling a monarchy. Their number one concern was power being concentrated into any one branch of government, but especially the executive, and their document tried to outline how that is to be avoided. But like most of what they wrote, the language was either too vague or too specific to be taken at face value.

By the early decades of the last century, the world had changed dramatically. Technology played a pivotal role as radio and film personalized and advanced charismatic personalities into strong leadership roles. Democracy seemed weak and a host of dynamic new media savvy leaders like Mussolini in Italy, Stalin in Russia and Hitler in Germany were transforming their countries into powerful nations. While parliaments and congresses dithered and bickered, they got things done. Germany went from a basketcase to a world power in just over a decade. In 1932, in the wake of the Great Depression, Americans elected their own savior, Franklin Roosevelt, and all eyes looked to him to grab the reigns of power and right the American ship.

Almost a century later, George W. Bush ran the most imperial presidency in American history. Love him or hate him, and regardless of who he listened to, there’s no doubt that he wielded unprecedented power over our nation from his desk in the Oval Office. When another depression loomed before us, as we did in the 30’s, we once again looked to an elegant and charismatic to replicate what Franklin Roosevelt had done and the Republican party braced itself for a generation in the wilderness.

And then a funny thing happened. Rather than assume the imperial presidency, Barack Obama reverted back to the Constitution and essentially disengaged the Executive Branch from legislating, tossing that ball back to Capital Hill where is supposed to belong. Instead of sending drafted legislation to congress, the way most every president since FDR has done, he simply waited for them to pull it together the way the framers had intended.

Oops.

The problem is that congress is now a very, very different entity than the Founding Fathers could have imagined. They were clever men, but they did not have crystal balls. They did not foresee how political parties, media, lobbyists, elections- and most of all money- would look two hundred years later. Nor did they anticipate just how arcane and complex the whole process would become and how “the people” would long since have been left in the dust of thousand plus page bills written intentionally in unintelligible language by invisible hands (virtually zero words of congressional legislation are ever written by elected legislators).

The reality is that over the last half century, the job of a congressperson was largely twofold- to cut out chunks of meat out of whale sized legislation as it drifted by their office for the folks back home and to appease the powerful lobbyists whose money got them re-elected. This system ensured that, for the most part, not only that mollusks and hacks comfortable with this arrangement would occupy those seats, but that leadership roles would go to those most happy with it and least likely to rock the boat- hence such feeble and flaccid lumps like Harry Reid, Dennis Hastrick and Tom Daschle found themselves in leadership chairs.

No doubt one of Obama’s intended consequences is that America is certainly now paying attention. We all got to see the sausage grinding up close and the embarrassing stunts of Joe Lieberman and naked hostage taking by Ben Nelson were played out in front of our eyes. The people of Nebraska will no doubt be thankful to Nelson while the rest of the country should be upset. That’s how the system was set up to work and Obama has waved it under our noses. We all gagged.

The great problem for Obama, and for all of us however, is that while reverting back to a purist’s observance of the founders’ outline of shared government makes perfect sense around a conference table or a grad school seminar, especially for a former constitutional professor, in practical reality it’s a disaster. The original system is simply too corrupted to work and the 21st century world moves too fast for anything of consequence to go through the endless tugging of committee after committee, conference after conference until the original tree has been whittled down to a single toothpick that takes a thousand words to express. The system is broken, and broken badly.

21st century America needs leadership and that’s why we elect presidents. We expect them to run with the ball, not to hand it off to someone else. We expect them to lead by “bully pulpit” which is just another way of saying that their personal style and qualities need to overcome the constitutional restrictions. Reagan and Roosevelt used the public and the media, Lyndon Johnson used the hallways and bathrooms of Capital Hill and late night phone calls. Whatever works, just get it done. As we all- and hopefully Obama- clearly saw, going “old school” certainly didn’t.

On Sunday we remembered the attack on Pearl Harbor and the beginning of the war that has defined our country ever since. People often try to compare September 11th with December 7th, but the two events are not even remotely comparable. There is no such thing as “Islamofascism” and Saddam was not “Hitler.” It is this very comparison, and others like it, that have led us down the path into the mess we are now in- again.

World War II is how we Americans like to see ourselves- honest, courageous, willing to sacrifice and most of all victorious over naked and obvious evil. World War II made us the undisputed good guys around the globe. That great victory, however, also spawned and has fueled our own mythology as the world’s valiant knight who must remain ever ready to take up arms in the cause of right. Over the years, however, the notion of what is “right,” and what is “evil” became conveniently conflated with what best served our needs. Virtually all of our subsequent military endeavors in the service of this mythology, and ourselves, has ended in either useless stalemate or disaster. A lot of money has been wasted and a lot of people have been killed and wounded.

The reason for this is that in World War II we were not fighting “fascism” but rather countries with defined armies and our military pursued attainable and recognizable victories. “War” means two armies fighting over real estate and when one side gets it the war is over. That’s how war works. Since that war, however, and in the service of our own needs and wants, we have upped the ante and declared war on nebulous ideas- communism, drugs and now endless strains of a conceptual enemy we can only roughly call “Islamic extremism.” What we yet to realize is that our military is not the tool for those problems- not in Korea, Vietnam, Columbia, Mexico, Iraq or Afghanistan. The even bigger problem is that, while we could go in and beat on the Vietnamese and then just bail out, now we really have ourselves in a mess because it is Pakistan that is the real problem and there’s nothing we can do about them but watch.

Powerlessness is our real problem now. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, we responded by kicking some serious ass to the point of vaporizing their citizens in a nuclear flash. But Afghanistan in not Japan, and in the nuclear age no one else will be ever again, but yet Barack Obama has made the decision to throw 30,000 more soldiers into the cauldron of IUD’s and cultural and religious conflict. He did it for the same reason people who are buried alive claw at the walls of their coffins- because they can’t just do nothing. But nothing is all that we can achieve there and the only question left is how much it will cost us.