Time to find a way to get better people back into public service

What's the real problem with politics in our country?

Completely apart from the issues, and the lack of common ground between the two parties, there's one thing that ought to be blindingly obvious to anyone who's paying attention.

The people running things aren't the people running things.

Sometime around 1980, people who had been going into public service, people who were inspired by John F. Kennedy, those people stopped working for the common good and started looking to make lots and lots of money.

Ronald Reagan was in the White House and everything got glitzy. All of a sudden, conservatives were acting as if public service was only for losers. Even though he has been misquoted ever since he said it, Reagan told the country that its problems when he was inaugurated in 1981 could not be solved by government.

It was pretty obvious that Reagan admired businessmen -- particularly successful ones -- a lot more than he admired people who worked for the government.

Capitalism had worked pretty well under government supervision in the postwar era, but conservatives believed it would work even better if government got out of the way.

Part of it was a switch from Keynesian economics -- in which the government had a role to play -- to the completely laissez-faire philosophy of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics. When Reagan took office, most of the people behind him were Friedman disciples. All of a sudden, every other government department was being hollowed out and everything that could be deregulated was being deregulated.

In 1981, the richest 1 percent of Americans held 7 percent of the country's wealth. Instead of trickling down, or a rising tide lifting all boats as Reagan predicted, more and more wealth flowed to those who already had plenty. For the next three decades, while middle class income remained flat at best, the rich benefited to the point where in 2013, that same 1 percent controlled 19 percent of America's treasure.

Along the way, as the salaries of people running companies soared, the difference between private industry and high government office made it much more difficult to attract top talent to public service. Senators and representatives were making in the low six figures, and no one in the government had a higher salary than the president's $200,000. Meanwhile, CEO salaries in the private sector had climbed into seven, eight and eventually even nine figures.

Add to that the way conservatives were denigrating public service, and at least among politicians, both winning and losing candidates were becoming more and more mediocre with every election cycle. Men who would have been laughed at in previous generations were running for president and being taken seriously. Eventually, women too.

As difficult as it was to imagine someone like Dan Quayle as president, the thought of a Sarah Palin or a Michelle Bachman seemed like something out of a bad Monty Python sketch.

It is truly appalling how bad the choices are on both sides in important races. This week in Virginia, voters were left with a choice between a Democrat who had never been much more than a fund-raiser and a Republican so far to the right that he wanted to outlaw oral sex between married couples in the privacy of their own homes.

Meanwhile in Washington, Congress is packed with mediocrities without an ounce of statesmanship. One Republican representative said if the people in his district wanted slavery to be legal, he would vote for it.

There used to be liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, so it was usually possible for the parties to find common ground for the good of the country. But there's a lot less common ground when each side sees the other as evil. And when voices on talk radio and 24-hour cable television networks are constantly hammering away, what happens is that people listen to the loudest voices.

Even the so-called intellectuals turn out to be just glib speakers. Paul Ryan is called a great thinker by Republicans, but all he really wants to do is dismantle government entitlements and privatize everything. As much as he has walked it back recently, he's basically a disciple of far-right author Ayn Rand.

So what's the solution?

There isn't an easy one. A big step in the right direction would be for terms like "evil," "un-American" and others like them to disappear from the debate. Another would be for both sides to remember that there aren't many issues on which one side gets everything they want and the other gets nothing.

In the end, we've got to make government service respectable again. We've got to attract the best people, because the problems we face as a society matter a lot more than making lots of money.

Really.