In a much-remarked upon piece, USA Today notes that the country is in one of its most sour moods in decades, a funk that is remarkable both for its depth as well as its duration:

In all, 72% of those surveyed in a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Oct. 12-14 say they are dissatisfied with how things are going in the USA while just 26% are satisfied. Not since April have even one-third of Americans been happy with the country’s course, the longest national funk in 15 years. …

There’s plenty of time for attitudes to change before the election, of course, but the current landscape is the sort that in the past has prompted political upheaval and third-party candidacies. The last time the national mood was so gloomy was in 1992, when the first President Bush was ousted from the White House and H. Ross Perot received the highest percentage of the vote of any third-party candidate in 80 years. Bill Clinton was elected amid economic angst.

The economic angst remains, of course; acute, if you are unlucky enough to work for the likes of Chrysler, or more diffuse, when it comes to issues like health care, where most private-sector workers are either are going to be dealing with big increases in insurance coverage or don’t have any.

But even without the mortgage market meltdown, even without the high prices at the pump, there’s a deep sense that something’s gone wrong. Much of that, indeed maybe even most of that, has to do with the Iraq war, the way it’s gone. It was going to be such a cathartic thing after 9/11; we were going to kick *ss, take names, prove our unquestioned dominance among nations once again, it was going to be a chance to feel good about ourselves again. And despite recent gains, it simply has not turned out that way. We got stuck in something lengthy and messy. There was no catharsis. And I suspect that’s led a lot of folks to feel as if they were being lied to and misled, even when some of them went along eagerly.

Yet at a time when people feel a need to turn away from the path and go down a new road, there doesn’t seem to be much of a new road. You liked the last seven years under Bush? Vote for virtually any of the Republican candidates, save Ron Paul, and get more of the same. Vote for Hillary and get more of the same, with maybe, you know, a little bit of a softer social edge.

We’re down this blind canyon and there doesn’t really seem to be anywhere to turn. That does, as USA Today notes, present an extraordinary opportunity for a third party, if there was one; it would be an opportunity for the Democratic Party to really differentiate itself, to show - as in this John Edwards ad - a little backbone, a little guts. Because one of the reasons I think people feel so uneasy is that while they may want to turn away from the failures of the GOP, what are they turning to? They have a sense that the Democratic Party doesn’t really have the answers - and they’re might be right.

And there’s a sense in all of this that maybe, you know, our time has come and gone. We want it to be morning in America again anew - but how, for instance, are we to bring the cost of health care under control without massive governmental intervention, and the concurrent taxation? How many decades shall we endure “hot” wars in the Middle East, and what does that do to our oil-based economy in the meantime? Here in a new gilded age there is virtually no populist economic outrage - the Republicans have done a good job these past years at convincing the average Rush Limbaugh listener that his interests are indistinguishable from that of the richest families in the country. The upshot is the country is now more individualistic than at any time I can remember, yet individuals are more vulnerable than before. Case in point would be here in Pennsylvania, where we acquiesced to energy deregulation; PPL is moving right along - but will begin to extract significantly more money from you, the customer, very soon.

We’re desperate for another “morning in America,” then. And that’s not just a depressing, but also a dangerous place to be.