Good Morning.

Today is not about either Romney nor Obama. Ever notice how hard it is to get anything done in Washington?

I've been thinking...we all know that Congress is the real problem. Everything is a power struggle, or a chess move, or a roadblock. With extraordinarily few exceptions, nobody even considers working together for the common good anymore.

It didn't used to be this way.

We can all look in the rear-view mirror and probably pick a spot or two when this began to change, but I'm not after that right now. There's so many factors that affect the Presidency and the effectiveness of any legislative plan. In my opinion, it seems that there is roughly a two-year window for an incoming president to get anything done, then it's all over.

The House of Representatives is up for election in its entirety every two years, along with roughly 1/3 of the Senate on their six-year cycle. I think this may be part of the problem. It's one of those things...just because the Founders tried it this way doesn't mean they got it right.

I don't think a parliamentary system is the answer. Most countries around the world elect a body of representatives, and whoever is the majority gets to pick the "prime minister" or other head-of-state. There is some elegance in this simplicity, but somehow I don't think this would work for America.

Many proposals have been made to change the Presidential term of office to a single six or eight year term. This would eliminate the problem of beginning the next campaign the day after inauguration, but this doesn't really address the true problem.

My proposal would be a little more interesting....The presidential term of office should be a single 8-year term. (no re-election!). Then the Senate should be trimmed to four years, but everyone would be up at the same time in the off-cycle four years (where we'd normally have a presidential re-election campaign). And the House would remain unchanged at every two years.

Sure, there will still be mid-term elections, and power changes, but there is also a stronger possibility that the President will get more than 2 years to work on an agenda. Imagine for a minute if President Obama had the advantage of the sea change and the Democrats had control of the White House, House of Representatives, and the Senate for not two years, but four? Many of the things we wanted were just barely starting to take hold when the mid-terms happened and everything came to a crashing halt. (There is the other side of the coin, but knowing that a significant change could happen every two or four years keeps an awful lot of people going.)

Maybe it's our psyche; America has become so impatient, but many things simply don't happen overnight no matter how much we want them to. I think we've got to give them more time.