Fifty-fifty.

It sounds so good, so fair. Isn't equal what we've all been pushing for for so long?

We've made it politically, but it's hard to find anybody who's happy with the result. The whole country is about 50 percent Democrat 50 percent of the time, 50 percent Republican 50 percent of the time.

On every issue facing the country - everything from health care to Iraq - people seem to argue one side for 30 minutes, then carefully switch and give the other side its 30 minutes. Every statement is weighed with an eye toward finding a statement of the same weight to counter what's being said at the moment.

We have learned to go through surveys, find the related questions (the ones that really count) and make sure our answers to the key ones match up. People who read polls find it more and more boring, and then find themselves wishing they'd come across some nut out there who would just get fired up about something - anything! At the same time, they don't want to hand the boss anything that might rock his boat.

As we come down from celebrating the nation's birthday, one word could describe the festivities - whatever...

And there is no better issue to illustrate the national mood than the current debate (if it can be called that) in Washington over whether or not to include a medicine plank in the Medicare scaffolding. Everybody's for it, of course, but the public servants there must always be on the lookout for a political edge in the 50-50 quagmire. The bill has to be worded very carefully, and the debate must be couched in the vaguest of pro- and anti- language. After all, if it doesn't work, one side can later blame the other, thus gaining that one percent necessary to stay in office through the upcoming elections. It's the same story with an Iraqi War gone bad and getting worse. Early-day right-wingers like Newt Gingrich were experts at the 51 percent strategy. It is all you need these days.

The whatever mood is even trickling down into states. Kentucky's candidates for governor are offering "hope" and "clean-up" in their campaigns for the big office in Frankfort. Ask anybody which candidate is offering which and you'll get about 50 percent right answers, 50 percent wrong answers. But one percent will know and will like the words well enough (even though hope for what and what is to be cleaned up are not spelled out). The current governor is being lambasted for everything from straight sex to pardons to crying on camera, but the public can't help but love the guy. He actually did something, even if it was wrong! Haven't seen that phenomenon since Bill Clinton, who enjoyed the same kind of appreciative popularity. You can't look at either man and say "whatever..."

Nearly every decision coming out of the Supreme Court these days is five to four, meaning we are looking more and more to the courts to run the country and that they are running it exactly the way we are running the country. We have so carefully avoided heartfelt debate for so long that we have begun to search for some kind of reality check on ourselves. Starting with the last presidential election, the Supreme Court has expressed the 50-50 split with the best of them.

But candidates only reflect. They do represent the rest of us, whether or not we want to admit it. We have become a culture that has lost most things really meaningful to ourselves. Somehow, we have slid into a people not working on basic and important issues but one that fiddles around the edges of issues. We work harder at cutting off the messages of others than we do at getting our own basic message out there in the marketplace of ideas. It is as if we know our own message isn't going to resonate with more than that precious one percent, so we try to be heard by that minority, spending great sums to bash the opposition only slightly.

It is hard to see where all this will lead. While we pedal hard on things like anti-smoking campaigns to forget the impending crisis in health care, we get some small rewards. While we sue restaurants because our children are too fat to forget about the chase for status that takes us away from them, the lot of children gets a little worse every year. While we constantly fight the superficial abuse of others, we work ourselves to death to buy the jeans they make in sweatshops. To feel less guilty about it, we go on talk shows and blast the sweatshops while wearing what comes from the shops.

Basically, the nation needs a good national argument. And it isn't morality; we've got as much of that now as we've ever had in human history, and we're not likely to make much more of it than we've had in the past. Also, arguments about who is or isn't victims of either morality or its absence can go on for centuries to no real purpose. That is another too-long sermon that is too short on results and distracts us from some yet undiscovered greater good.

What we have to find is something larger than the current competition for that powerful one percent, something that can get at least 60 percent of the people excited enough to pitch in their two cents. It's more than a get-out-the-vote campaign. It's more than appeals to buy our quota of merchandise to help the economy. We haven't had such an idea since the War on Poverty. In that one, we nearly won the war but we're losing the peace we've gained.

We can hope that somebody will come up with an idea, because we will lose the country if we go on running it with one percent of the people.