A nation of whiners.

"Politics," says Bill Bradley, "is broken." His fix is to quit the Senate and "focus on the lives of the people who are disconnected from the political process." And just maybe run for president.

Three suggestions, senator. Start by telling all those disconnected people to stop whining. Then tell the politicians to stop pandering to the whining. Then tell the media to stop exploiting the whining.

Can anyone really believe the problem with American politics is that the folks who claim to be alienated from it - most inclusively defined, the nearly three-quarters of Americans who now routinely tell pollsters they don't trust their government - aren't being heard?

The problem is that they're running the show. They own the radio talk circuit, the catch-a-scoundrel television newsmagazines, the late-night comedy monologues, the prime-time sitcoms, and the afternoon Oprah-and-Phil whine-alongs, to say nothing of Madison Avenue and Hollywood.

Their grievances have become our national entertainment - neatly packaged, voraciously consumed. Their everybody's-out-to-screw-me take on life is ground zero of the popular culture.

The political press lavishes attention on their rumblings about the need for a third party or another independent presidential run by the likes of Ross Perot or Colin Powell, and never mind that the central truth about the "radical middle" of our political spectrum is that its members have no common ideology.

Some are liberal, some conservative, some libertarian. What grieves them doesn't start with politics and, in the main, can't be fixed by politics. It is spiritual, social, moral, and economic. That's why, at Perot's whinerama in Dallas earlier this month, the best audience responses went to empathetic speakers from distant poles of the ideological map - Jesse Jackson on the left and House Budget Committee chairman John Kasich on the right.

Here's a radical notion: When the whiners insist the problem is rooted in politics, their delusions become self-fulfilling. Their media-stoked anger creates the dysfunctional foundation upon which the nation's political conversation is held, its candidates elected, and its public policy made. They do as least as much damage to politics as politics does to them.

In 1992, the whiners achieved the latest in a string of dubious political victories by electing a president who is forever reassuring them: "I feel your pain." Naturally, this makes them whine even louder.

But their impact on politics didn't begin with President Clinton. For a generation now, the angry middle class has systematically put into office politicians of both parties who over-indulge them, to everyone's eventual grief. What is the hated national debt but the cumulative choice by one cowed Congress and president after another to give the American people all the goodies they demand, then flinch at charging them at 100 cents on the dollar?

When the angry populists get angrier still about the way this shell game has mortgaged their children's future, they scour the landscape for scapegoats. Is it the big money boys, the corporate lobbyists, the PAC men, the NAFTA brigade? Or is it the lily-livered politicians? Welfare cheats? Illegal immigrants? Single mothers? Blacks? Whites? Japanese? Mexicans? Detective Fuhrman? All the usual suspects get trashed, except of course the perps themselves, who just get more angry.

Before I push this curmudgeonly screed any further, let me put my own suspect credentials on the table: I write with some complicity and, at least for another moment or two, some distance.

I'm recently back from a three-year stint as the Post's correspondent in South Africa, where I covered the brave transformation from apartheid to democracy. Before that, I covered American politics for two decades.

In South Africa, I had the chance to observe political leadership at its most sublime. Had Nelson Mandela and Frederik W. de Klerk been guided by the angry voices in their respective constituencies, South Africa probably would have been plunged into a race war. Instead, using moral suasion and pragmatic statesmanship, they persuaded nervous supporters to accept a scary racial compromise. Mandela and de Klerk each succeeded precisely to the degree that an element of their message to the people was: Stick your pain where the moon don't shine; one day you'll thank me.

During those three years abroad I also kept half an eye trained homeward. From 8,000 miles away, American society looked impossibly rich, breathtakingly dynamic, and pathologically whiny.

Poor, bedraggled Africa probably isn't the clearest vantage point from which to observe anything in the First World. Nonetheless, here's what I saw from there: An America that had colonized the planet with democracy, language, currency, computers, movies, music, blue jeans, and fast food. An America whose inflation and unemployment was low, whose stock market was booming. An America at peace. An America that had slain communism in the second half of the century, just as it had slain fascism in the first.

Job well done! Let's party! Yet everyone in America I saw on CNN seemed to want to shoot, shout, or sue.

Plainly, some of this dyspepsia is a morning-after phenomenon. After wars, hot or cold, nations lose their sense of mission. And some is the stress on everyday lives caused by a shift in economic epochs, from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. And some is a winner-takes-all dynamic that keeps driving American income distribution toward more distant poles of inequality. And some is the frustrating wage stagnation of the middle class. And some is the confusing change in gender roles and relationships. Together, all of these forces have undermined the nuclear family, society's most reliable incubator of values and morals.

Hey, we've got air conditioning, ESPN, Dove Bars, and lots of other good stuff. But Americans still seem to have convinced themselves that life in the past few decades keeps getting worse.

Part of the delusion is sustained by my craft. In a complex world, the culture of complaint makes journalism less difficult. There's a grievance; there's a victim; there's a bad guy. Whining (and O.J.) has become the touchstone that connects us all. It ridges our diversity. It moves product.

At the hollow core of this culture of complaint, there's an element of hype - a kind of tacit conspiracy between the media and the whiners. The latter have grown savvy about which sound-bites will get them into the national conversation. The former, if they're so inclined, can extract a fuming quote from just about anyone. I've found that if you talk to most Americans long enough, they turn out to have nuanced, common-sense views (if not always quotable quotes) about almost everything, including their government. They may not be especially well-informed, but they're smart.

They're certainly right that the political system isn't responsive to their anxieties. But they're wrong that their anxieties can be reduced to neat public policy solutions. Or that the sky is somehow falling.

Freed from cosmic worries, spared of wars or depressions, bereaved of global enemies, Americans in the 1990s are gazing at their navels and grousing about the lint. It's human nature.

Both the politicians and the media have a professional interest in pretending the stakes are huge. So the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress gets blown up as a "historic" realignment, and already the '96 presidential contenders are talking about a "once-in-a-lifetime" chance to reconfigure the size and scope of government.

The voters are pretty wise to this poppycock, but it feeds their frustration with politics. They keep hearing about all the upheavals that are supposed to be coming out of Washington; then they check their own lives and discover nothing's changed. They feel jerked around. They switch channels, or turn off the set altogether.

The problem is that the real source of what ails America lies beyond the reach of government. Nobody, for example, wants to live in a society where a third of all children are born out of wedlock and half grow up in homes without their biological father. Everyone understands how that tears apart the social fabric.

Yet politicians indulge the conceit that they can change these behaviors. Right now they're debating welfare policy, a useful debate to have. But the personal behavior of the poor (or anyone else) is substantially beyond the reach of policy; always has been.

If there was a little more honesty from on high about what government can do, maybe there'd be a little less anger from below about what it cannot.

But maybe not. I often wondered these past three years how Mandela or de Klerk would have fared in the cynical pit of American politics. They're both gifted politicians, but part of their success was based on the respect that Africans have for their leaders and institutions. It is a continent full of willing followers (often too willing); in this instance they were served by exceptional leaders.

In America at the moment, that relationship has gone awry. Our leaders won't lead and our followers won't follow.

It's hard to imagine how the logjam gets broken from below. The laws of human nature can't be repealed. Cynicism begets cynicism.

Still, each of us can make a start. I hereby vow as a returning political journalist not to report at face value all the whining I'm sure to hear between now and November 1996. But the real burden, I'm afraid, lies with politicians like you, Senator Bradley. By all means, go out and listen to the voices of the disconnected. But not too long. What they really need is a good talking to.

Excerpted from The Washington Post

Paul Taylor covers politics for The Washington Post.