By Bob Gibson
Charlottesville political blogger

We are living in a time of great promise, and probably unrealistic expectations.

Politics is changing at an ever-faster pace, spurred by unrealistic timelines, short attention spans and vast quantities of impatience.

Patience and looking ahead more than a year or two for future needs are virtues better understood in China than in our culture. The Chinese better understand timelines.

We are a tremendously impatient people who expect instantaneous solutions to difficult problems and we are prepared to tar-and-feather leaders who don’t cater to the simplistic notion of what have you done for me today.

Another way of looking at that is that our leaders may have done a poor job of setting realistic expectations and selling achievable timelines for accomplishments.

Most people today are not hard-core Democrats or hard-core Republicans. They are more independent than that and ready to turn against either party if it fails to meet minimal political expectations.

The media, which is also in a state of great flux and economic uncertainty, must share the blame for worshiping in the church of what’s happening now and why wasn’t it fixed yesterday.

Unrealistic timelines for solutions of long-term problems are set in today’s celebrity-and-entertainment-driven media, which is earning lower marks for trustworthiness along with most other institutions.

Bankers are depicted as thieves, lawyers as ambulance chasers, medical professionals as out-of-control profit centers, journalists as biased liars and politicians as worse than the rest of those professional scoundrals.

Why are the politics of our state and our nation seen as corrupted, out of touch and less than admirable?

Being a political leader today can be seen by as many as half the people as a little dirty, and suspect. Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook” line is becoming a more commonly disbelieved defense.

When partisanship gets too intense, too pervasive, too prolonged and too nasty, the two teams that can’t play ball together earn scorn from non-affiliated independents as well as from the partisans of the other side.

It’s sort of like leveraging two-thirds of the public against your own excessive partisanship.

A lot of people view politics today as entertainment. This may feed some of the tendencies toward intense partisanship.

“In 2008, the presidential election became blockbuster entertainment,“ reads the first line in the new book Game Change by a pair of veteran journalists, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann.

The presidential level does leave politicians open to be viewed as celebrities much more so than at the levels of politics closer to the people, and closer to the community. We are much more likely to treat neighbors as neighbors and as real people as opposed to celebrities when they are in political leadership roles at the local level.

But being a political leader does increase one’s visibility as just about any level above the soil and water conservation board, which is an elected position in Virginia somewhat quieter than the school board.

Still, unfortunate stereotypes become attached to many political leaders.

Democrats are depicted as tax-and-spend, terrorist-coddling baby killers and Republicans as pollution-loving, anti-tax, climate change denying, borrow-and-spend war mongers.

No wonder they can’t get along.

In truth, leadership involves the willingness and the ability to make ethical choices among competing goods and to compromise and work together to get things done.

Virginia has a long and distinguished list of political leaders and community leaders who, by and large, have understood the ethical demands and constraints of leadership.

At times, they can even work together.

One of those times in when government is divided as it is now and economic conditions are dire, as they are today.

A government that can’t compromise is a government that can quickly fail.

Now is a good time for injecting ethics, civility, respect and trust in politics along with a belief in the value of working together across the aisle to get things done for the people of our localities, our state and our nation.

Ethical choices involve timelines. What can we do today and what must we do for tomorrow.