We journalists tend to cover politics the way we cover sports:

Republicans are gaining yardage on their immigration play! The Tea Party is stealing second base! A bench-clearing brawl over health care! Look at the politicians and pundits mud-wrestle!

So let’s try an experiment: Let’s treat this midterm election as if it might actually profoundly shape the well-being of our country.

For starters, look at the Republican accusation that Democrats are killing jobs while leaving the United States deeply indebted. “Democrats continue to double-down on their job-killing policies,” the Republicans say in their Pledge to America. Rick Scott, the Republican running for governor in Florida, complains that his Democratic opponent “backed the failed stimulus bill, which created debt, not jobs.”

The Republicans start with a fair point: Democrats haven’t delivered what they promised. The unemployment rate rose from 7.7 percent when President Obama took office to more than 10 percent and was still 9.6 percent at last count in August. The Democrats had predicted that unemployment would fall to about 7 percent by now. That was flat wrong.