Presidents Day about voters, too

In his farewell address to the American people in 1796, outgoing President George Washington warned that unbridled competition among political parties — the “spirit of party,” he called it — will weaken the American republic:

“It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.”

On this Presidents Day, in the heat of a vitriolic presidential campaign, the first president’s words sound prescient.

The past seven years have been exhausting. The endless partisan battles — over Obamacare, government spending, immigration, social issues, taxes of any kind — have polarized the major political parties to the point where once- normal political compromise seems impossible.

Important challenges, including immigration reform and fixing the tax code, remain undone. Once-routine actions, such as raising the debt ceiling or holding a hearing on the president’s budget, have deteriorated into partisan sniping.

And with this deterioration comes the kind of coarsened politics that have made the current presidential campaign more a blood sport than a serious debate about America’s future.

The leading GOP candidate, Donald Trump, heaps scorn on his opponents, calling them liars, idiots and losers. To his opponents, Trump is unhinged, a misogynist, a bigoted carnival barker.

Furthermore, the ferocious conservative Republican backlash against Barack Obama remains a hallmark of the GOP candidates, who seem physically incapable of acknowledging any progress over the last seven years. The message seems to be: The country is going to hell in a hand basket. Thanks, Obama.

Even the Democratic candidates — who could tout expanded health care, lower energy prices, a 4.9 percent unemployment rate and an economy pulled from the brink of disaster, not to mention the death of Osama bin Laden — talk about a nation facing intractable social and economic problems.

“We still have a long, long way to go,” says Bernie Sanders.

But go where? Both Sanders and Hillary Clinton dismiss reasonable Republican pleas for a less intrusive, more efficient government in favor of a greatly expanded one.

So it’s no wonder that public confidence in our governmental institutions has reached extraordinary lows. A recent Gallup Poll showed confidence in Congress at 8 percent, down 16 percentage points from the historical average; confidence in the presidency was 33 percent, down 10 points.

But there’s no cause for despair. The long, difficult road to the presidency tends to winnow out the weak.

Our choices will come more clearly into focus as the campaign proceeds, and voters can, and should, demand more substantive proposals from the remaining candidates.

“We’ve got to build a better politics, one that’s less of a spectacle and more of a battle of ideas, one that’s less of a business and more of a mission,” Obama said in a Feb. 10 speech in Springfield, Ill.

Such ambitions are not meant just for politicians, but also for the citizens who hire them. The opportunity to change the direction of our country and our politics comes from grass-roots political participation that, over time, can move mountains.

After all, our next president will not be chosen by political parties, but by all the American people — and we shouldn’t lose faith in ourselves.