This theme—the government is broken, frozen, incapacitated, petty, pathetic—is everywhere. TIME and CNN have even made it a week-long theme. Newsweek’s Jon Meacham, in typical mahogany-paneled erudition, devotes his weekly column to assuring his readers that history has seen even worse. A new poll shows that 86 percent of Americans think the thesis “government is broken” is true. Perhaps more remarkably, that number is only 8 points higher than it was two years ago. In other words, the breakdown is not new in the public eye. It is a lasting condition. During the 2008 election cycle, such stasis could easily be understood as a Republican failure, an idea that rocketed Barack Obama to the White House. But Obama has proven in his first year in office—with historic Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress—that the condition transcended George W. Bush’s penchant for preemptive war and peanut butter sandwiches.

The proper pose for reporters like me at a moment like this is to adjust like a politician, positioning myself outside the political maw to rail, with a bit of populist fervor, against the rottenness of the system. This is not hard. The system is rotten with hypocrisy and self-dealing. It has been for a while, and in some ways it has gotten worse. But railing against the machine, even if done with more fealty to facts than your typical political stump speech, is not in itself a solution.