Hurry, hurry, hurry. The show's about to start.

Bill Clinton succeeded a failed GOP presidency and realized the entire corporatist agenda -- banking reform, telecom reform, welfare reform, free trade, etc. -- that the Republicans were unable to achieve.

Barack Obama followed a criminal GOP presidency and upped the ante on his predecessor's worst policies -- expanding militarism, domestic spying, military adventurism, etc., while coming up with some of his own, like extrajudicial assassination and quasi-legal or more probably illegal and certainly immoral deployment of drones, torture of Bradley Manning, tightening government secrecy and prosecuting whistle-blowers, at the same time allowing the war criminals and financial gangsters of the Bush era to go free.

Why does this happen? The liberals and leftists in Congress, and there are more than a few, will fight tooth and nail against a Republican who pursues such policies; but conservative Democrats like Clinton and Obama, by "triangulating" between the two congressional parties, neutralize and emasculate progressive Democrats in Congress who find it difficult to oppose "our guy."

The differences between Mitt Romney and Obama are in matters of revenue and spending that are largely legislative in nature; in the policies that are in the purview of the executive -- the conduct of the Department of War, the Justice Department, etc. -- there is virtually no disagreement between the candidates or the presidential parties.

The Democrats run for president as the champions of economic justice, but in office they can never seem to get the job done; the Republicans are the upholders of family values and individual rights, yet they leave office with such matters pretty much where they found them.

In the meantime, it is business as usual for capitalists, militarists, the security state. Like Obama's newfound populism, Romney's weird embrace of teapartyism will disappear after the election; if he wins, he will govern from near the center-right inhabited by Obama now -- Romney will move left as president, just as Obama will move right. The game is kept going by bogus political theater in which both sides try to persuade a majority that they are the lesser-of-two-evils. And we fall for it every time.