So, you are one of those "can't fight city hall" sorts, are you? ;)

I agree, the system works extremely well for crooks and corrupt politicians and their party apparatchiks. However, at the moment it isn't working very well for the citizenry. That is when change becomes most possible.

There are good examples of non-partisan consensus governance here in North America. There are our Canadian examples, like Nunavut, or the US examples of many local governments and judicial systems or the Nebraska Legislature.

It is more of an education problem than anything else. Our fourth estate doesn't do a very good job educating the citizenry.

The web is changing all that though. I truly believe the system in the US, as it is today, will be quite short-lived. Change is coming, whether Joe or Jane Middle Class Partisan Voter wants it to or not.

Fifty years from now, people will look upon this era as the Dark Ages of US politics that the new system was set up to correct.

That isn't to say a new system will cure all the ills. Progress depends, however, on the will of enough people to see that it cures at least a few of the worst ills, so the patient doesn't die.

It is true, it won't be a Democrat or a Republican president that will "fix" the system. It will be a grassroots movement, like all movements for authentic political change in the US have been. Movements for political change never start from within the corrupt system--they form outside the system and exert pressure to force the changes.