I have in mind a template for a properly functioning United States government.

It's a Jeffersonian democracy. It's a capitalist system (though not completely unregulated or monopolistic). It's governed by a tripartite system of checks and balances. Voters are educated and informed by reliable media. The president and the Congress listen to their constituents, and the entire system is transparent to everyone, save for essential matters of national security. Political parties vigorously argue their cases, though in the end one or the other functions as the loyal opposition. Compromises are shaped with input from both sides of the political street.

At this moment, however, the state of the union is shaky.

There is no one reason, but here is an important one. Newspapers are less read, less influential than they used to be. TV's broadcast news is reduced in influence because of cable channel infotainment, radio talk shows and Internet sites and blogs. Because media information is nowadays slanted to produce higher ratings, the sensational and exciting developments are featured, while unbiased factual information is hard to come by. Fox News, featuring Glenn Beck, is pretty much a house organ of far right republicanism. MSNBC is reliably liberal-left democratic. CNN is sometimes middle-of-the road. Rush Limbaugh holds the radio franchise for far-right republicanism. Beck and Limbaugh excel in name-calling. Barack Obama is a Hitler, a fascist, a socialist, a communist. The Fox screen shows Obama with a Hitler mustache painted on. Limbaugh wants Obama to fail-and presumably this nation right along with him since, apparently, ideology is more important than national success. Sarah Palin joins in with her interpretation of paid end-of-life counseling as "death panels." Altogether, we are treated to a melange of cheap invective, misinformation and sheer insanity.

There are deeper reasons underlying the shaky state of the union. The Democrats, led by Obama, decisively won the election. But the Democrats are divided between House and Senate; the Blue Dogs, elected from conservative districts, are not in tune with their more liberal fellows. And Obama, on the issue of health care, seems to have learned his lesson from previous failures all too well. Writing in advance of Wednesday's speech to a joint session of Congress, I cannot discern if he is fully devoted to the public option or some "trigger" of that option, or if he is willing to exercise a one-sided bipartisanism and go with half a loaf or even less. Obama's approval numbers are trending downward, even among the independent voters who elected him. Can he regain the needed leadership on this issue-and others? Time will tell.

But the deepest reason for division, name-calling and foolish distortions of fact rest not just on health care's complexity but on a combination of other factors of national stress. We're faced with a national debt, which may rise to $11 trillion; taxes are going to be raised-inevitably. Let's hope the Chinese keep loaning us money. We've been in Afghanistan for eight years and it begins to look a lot like Vietnam. The "recovery" is so far jobless with the unemployment rate likely to reach 10 percent. The government has had to rescue private enterprise at what seems to many an alarming rate - with a public option in health care being the last straw. Congressmen are the target of millions spent on lobbying by the drug and insurance companies. Are they listening to their constituents or their paymasters?

The state of the union must return to something resembling the Jeffersonian model I started with. But to do so there must be unusually effective leadership from the president. There must be real bipartisanship from both sides of the aisle. There must be a return to fiscal responsibility in the near term. We must find an honorable exit to our protracted wars..

I will place my bet on Obama and the American people.