Things may be bad but no worse, it seems to me, than usual. The fact that, once again, neither party has managed to nominate a really inspiring ticket makes the scene look drearier than it might.

Surely the world was worse off in 1942. And the nation is in far better shape than it was between 1967 and 1974, when the Vietnam War was raging with far more intensity than the current conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the economy was poor, hard drug use was skyrocketing,leaders were assassinated, and riots swept every major U.S. city. (In Indianapolis in the late '90s, you could still see the burned-out wreckage of the 1968 riot.)

Nowadays the spectre of catastrophic terrorist attacks is all too real, but perhaps it's less horrible than was the threat of general nuclear war with the Soviets. Many people have a hard time now realizing just how close to mutual destruction we came, on more than one occasion.