In America, it's an election year 50% of the time

I was listening to the radio, and heard them say that the health care reform bill might run into trouble if it runs past new years, because next year is an election year, and politicians wouldn't like to support a controversial bill before an election.

You hear this sort of thing a lot, and it helps illustrate how utterly dysfunctional American governance has become. You have a presidential election every fourth year, and then a congressional mid-term election every two years in between that.

To illustrate, these are the election years starting from the millenium: 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010.

Literally half of the time it is an election year. This wasn't such of a problem in the past, before the mediatization of American politics, but modern election campaigns generally last the whole year.

So effectively you have a political culture where half the time is viewed as a bad time to do anything that might be controversial. And controversial, as it happens, is also a synonym for "actually helps people" or "makes things better". You'll never get in trouble voting for corporate interests in an election year.

So there is a vanishingly small window of time in which it is viewed as acceptable or possible to make changes.

Update: To clarify how this works, I should note that members of congress have 2 year terms, they all have to run in every one of those elections I mentioned above. Senators have 6 year terms, but their elections are staggered, 1/3 of them are up for re-election each election cycle.