News flash: The federal government is stepping in to solve one of the worst financial crisis this country has ever seen.

So where was Washington a year ago? Or two or three?Answer: bogged down in a never-ending partisan debate between no-regulation Republicans and pro-regulation Democrats.

Back then, the crisis was on the horizon. It hadn’t washed to shore yet.

So we fiddled.

The same apparently holds true for other “crises” of our time: health care reform, Social Security, Medicare, the budget deficit. All are serious concerns, but, well, a solution for what ails each can wait for tomorrow…can’t it?

 It’s that mindset that democracy most struggles with. Give us a crisis, and we rally like Trojan warriors.

 But toss us a long-term problem that requires bipartisan consensus these days and, well, let’s form a commission, debate it a little more, then kick it around a little.

Energy crisis anyone? Jimmy Carter mentioned something about that in the 1970s.

In his introduction to government class each year, Bob Beatty, a political scientist at Washburn University in Topeka, makes precisely the same link between democracy and inefficiency.

 “A lot of the research on democracy shows that actually it can be much less efficient than other forms of government, including, you hate to say it, dictatorships,” Beatty said. 

 U.S. democracy also is less efficient than other democracies around the globe, he said. Take Great Britain. With its parliamentary system, the Brits aren’t bogged down to the same extent with this separation of powers idea that was part of the Founding Fathers’ original vision.

 In England, whichever party is dominant elects the prime minister. There’s an expectation then, that the party in power will implement the agenda it presented to voters.

But America, of course, broke from England, rejecting an old version of that system. Suspicious of the trappings of power, the Founding Fathers shackled it.

 The irony, Beatty says, is we continue to elect “outsiders” like Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to the presidency to shake things up, regain control over an unresponsive government. Most fail.

 “Most of these guys get to D.C. and realize that they can’t do anything,” Beatty said. “The only guy who figured it out was Reagan because he was a force-of-personality guy.

 “We probably need to send people who understand the system to get anything done.”

 Example: Lyndon Johnson, who understood how to control the levers of congressional power perhaps better than any president in history.

 “Our system is built to be ponderously slow and non-reactive unless there is a crisis,” Beatty said.

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Last week on the radio, I talked to a pair of nuclear weapons experts — Lt. Gen. Robert Gard, chairman of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, and Dr. Ira Helfand, co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility.

 The upshot of that conversation: There are lots of unsecured nuclear weapons floating around that easily could fall into the wrong hands.

If they do, look out. Twenty minutes into that conversation, I wanted to race home and start digging an underground bomb shelter.

John Kerry and George W. Bush talked about the same thing in their first debate four years ago, with Bush calling loose nukes “the biggest threat facing this country” and Kerry decrying the “600-plus tons of unsecured material still in the former Soviet Union and Russia.”

Securing those weapons was proceeding at a glacial pace, Kerry complained. “At the rate that the president is currently securing it, it’ll take 13 years to get it.”

Sounds like a crisis to me. But is it crisis enough?

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In response to a column two weeks ago, a reader points out that Barack Obama supported Joe Lieberman in the 2006 Democratic primary, but not in the general election campaign.

That column dealt with Democratic frustration over Lieberman’s backing of John McCain.

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 He said it: “If this race turns into a beauty contest, I’ve got a serious problem.” -- Mike Gibbons, the GOP nominee for Missouri attorney general, in his first debate with Democrat Chris Koster.

Gibbons is hair-challenged; Koster isn’t. Or was there more to it than that?