Eh, I think that analogy falls flat. Both sides want "change," and both sides broadly want change taken from their respective playbooks in the 2000s, the 1990s, and even the 1980s.

What makes politics difficult isn't that people don't want to iterate on government, but that people have radically different product visions. One wants to make an enterprise CRM, and the other wants to make a microblogging site for cats. That naturally leads to massive dysfunction, as you end up somewhere in the middle and people cynically playing cough politics for internal advancement since everyone's stuck in the same place with no hope for real vision or resolution.

>Eh, I think that analogy falls flat. Both sides want "change,"

Rhetorical change, maybe; they're also for tradition, security, the heartland, and babies.

Changing from an incumbent to a challenger is actual change, and no party is in support of that except in the specific cases that benefit their own candidates.

We don't know what "people" want, but I do think that to whatever degree we can find such things out, we probably have a higher degree of confidence that the government doesn't want to iterate on the people who comprise it. The revolving door is a highly-valued feature in DC. That's what voting against incumbents threatens.

That might make sense if we didn't have such a divided government.

Such division is a symptom of the status quo. Change the people and you introduce more noise into the system and divisions break down.

I'm not sure that your conclusion necessarily follows from your premise. We got a bunch of new people (mainly tea Party types) at the last Congressional election and if anything they've been more obstructive than the 111th Congress.

It may take more than one election cycle.

Then you should work to make this a common option in the United States: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/None_of_the_above

You should not arbitrarily vote for candidates who do not match your beliefs as part of some sort of protest.

That does send a message, but I haven't seen it being effective yet.

Over here, we have a very bad municipal government, so when elections came, with a bad officialist candidate that was called a "fridge" and divided opposition, over 15% voted "none".

So far, it hasn't had much of an effect (though the governing party has taken note of it, for the next elections).