It is my deeply held conviction that the root problem in our US government today is the lack of an imperative for our members of Congress to work together to achieve meaningul legislation that addresses the severe problems that we face in this country.

It is so difficult, however, to expect our Congresspeople to behave in ways that are inconsistent with incentives.

The incentive that drives individual behavior for those who wish to be reelected is money.

The McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law of 2002 has been slowly unravelled over the last few years. And an imminent Supreme Court ruling is very likely to essentially eviscerate the last remaining tenets of reform. Re enter excessive money into campaigns from all sorts of interested third parties - corporations, labor unions, special interest groups, political action committees. Dollars that are spent this way expect "me" votes.

"Me" votes are those that align with the ideology or specific causes of the donors. "Me" votes are not cast with an eye to the greater good or broader context of good governance. "Me" votes are short sighted and represent a cynical devolution of how our government functions today. Without "me" votes politicians cannot raise the funds needed to be reelected.

What we need is "we" votes. "We" votes require that our politicians reach across the isle and across ideological divides to craft legislation that addresses the significant problems that face our country. "We" votes require that our politicians forgo indebtedness to the special interests that heretofore have funded their campaigns. "We" votes demand that members of Congress beat to a different drum, driven by the incentive of solving our country's problems, not the short term focus of reelection.

But we cannot expect our members of Congress to ignore their reelection prospects. Moving wholesale from "me" votes to "we" votes is a certain death knoll for reelection given our current campaign finance situation.

Do we want to solve our country's problems? If so, we need to start by solidifying and tightening our campaign finance limits. Right now, however, we are sewing the seeds of our own destruction with myopic, cynical actions driven by nothing but the self interest of "me".