I think there's something to this...

From the BBC here ("How Washington's politicians downgraded America"). [Quoted in full below.] [My comments, etc. below that.]

The downgrading of America is a humiliation for a nation constantly fretting about its potential decline. It reinforces a very common belief here, that the squabbling politicians in Washington are to blame for many of the country's ills.

It was indeed a major theme of candidate Obama that "business as usual" couldn't continue and, by an effort of will, America had to come together.

The decision by Standard & Poor's to push America into the second division, when it comes to trustworthiness about paying its bills, puts the USA below the UK, Germany, France, Singapore, Finland and 14 other countries.

The reason it gives is what all America has been saying: Washington doesn't work. The S&P report says: "The political brinkmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America's governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed."

A clumsy sentence, yet it encapsulates the frustration of many Americans. They don't think too much of the plan they did eventually come up with at the last minute.

"Our opinion is that elected officials remain wary of tackling the structural issues required to effectively address the rising US public debt burden in a manner consistent with a 'AAA' rating and with 'AAA' rated".

They warn America's debt will continue to balloon and they have little hope of the politicians fixing it.

They say they think dealing with the debt remains a "contentious and fitful process". They say no-one is serious about dealing with the programmes that eat up money, like Medicare, health care for the elderly.

They single out Republicans for ruling out tax rises. "It appears that for now, new revenues have dropped down on the menu of policy options... Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues."

My colleague Robert Peston has an excellent blog on the economics of this, but what about the politics?

President Obama will doubtless use the occasion to scold Congress again and urge politicians to come together not as Republicans or Democrats but as Americans. Some may be chastened enough to do that for a while.

But is [it] fair to put all the burden on the legislators, as though failure to agree a consensus is a moral lapse? The president is fond of saying that Americans vote for divided government not dysfunctional government.

Yet the system, a much-loved relic of a different age, constructed for reasons little to do with the 21st Century, is almost designed to bring about dysfunctional government. The combination of a strict separation of legislature and executive, plus two-yearly congressional elections, all but encourages having different parties in control of different bits of government.

Americans are likely to bemoan the failure of politicians to bridge an apparently unbridgeable gap between two different world views. They may put their faith in Washington politicians, in an outburst of patriotism and goodwill, stumbling on a synthesis that suits all sides. But I wonder whether any of them will muse that the system itself may not be fit for purpose.

I always like to get a foreign perspective. This was written by Mark Mardell, the BBC North American editor.

Here I'll hark back to the Founding Fathers, as the Tea Partiers always love to do. If the Founding Fathers had seen what was going on in the U.S. Congress today, I think they would have given us something a little different. Meanwhile the Dems have to win back the House if they want to make the tax code more fair (and we need to keep the Senate and Obama).

I think the worst thing Obama could possibly have done was to cut the deal last December extending the Bush tax cuts. (I'd even gone so far as to write the White House an email last fall, begging the President, whatever he did between then and the end of the year, not to do anything that would extend the Bush tax cuts.)

That deal done, however, then the ever-ballooning (tax-cut filled) deficit became the issue of the day, and the Republican House refuses to raise taxes on account of their anti-tax pledges with Grover Norquist. Unless the newly elected Tea Partiers were "independently wealthy" (as Lindsey Graham recently explained), Norquist could threaten their cushy new jobs (and great health benefits) if they either didn't sign or violated their pledges. So they're going after the social programs.

I'm all for Obama winning a second term, but ever since he made the dumb deal extending the Bush tax cuts, I've severed my ties with his campaign organization and have no plans to make any donations. (So glad I don't get those emails anymore!)

I really do have to agree with some of the points in the Gaius Publius post from Americablog (see my post below). FDR had nothing to lose in picking his fights in order to do what was right - the Roosevelts had already "arrived." (I've even visited FDR's Hyde Park, NY estate on the Hudson while on a family vacation way back when, even though my parents were anti-FDR.) (How liberal of them to include that stopover.) Barack and Michelle, however, still have to secure their fortunes and, in order to do so, must make nice with the powers that be. Pity the hapless folks who get the shaft in the process.

I remember seeing the Time cover with Obama sitting back in a car, holding a cigarette in his teeth (in a holder, à la FDR.) Now we know he's no FDR. And I've always been skeptical about his embrace of Ronald Reagan. Remember "Silence = Death"? (Obama probably doesn't.) Reagan killed a lot of gays by ignoring AIDS.

But I'll vote for Obama again. Only because the alternative would be much, much worse.