

(Sharon Day -- bigstockphoto)

The U.S. government -- our Congress, our governors and our president -- is a C student, according to new poll out of NBC and the Wall Street Journal.

Asked to give elected officials a grade from A to F, no politician scored better than a 2.1 grade point average, which is roughly a C. That passing grade was for the "governor of your state." Every other elected official fared even worse on the grading scale; President Obama's grade point average as 1.7 while Democrats (1.6) and Republicans (1.5) in Congress did even worse.

It's not terribly surprising that elected officials averaged a C- in the eyes of the American public, given some of the other numbers in the poll. Just 12 percent approved of how Congress is doing its job, matching the lowest ever measured in NBC-WSJ polling. (A stunning 83 percent of people disapprove of how Congress is doing its work.) Only one in four Americans believe the country is on the right track. Just more than four in ten approve of the job Obama is doing. Fifty-five percent of respondents say they would vote every member of Congress out of office if they could.

What does this report card mean for the election in 20 days? Theoretically, that anyone with "Sen.," "Gov." or "Rep." in front of their name could be fair game for an electorate that wants out with the old and in with the new. Asked whether they would prefer a candidate who had served in Congress for 10 years or one who had never served, a majority (55 percent) chose the person who had never served, while just one in five (22 percent) chose the political veteran.

And, we've seen some evidence of that distaste with politicians -- particularly in governors' races where people like Sam Brownback of Kansas and Dan Malloy of Connecticut are in deep electoral trouble despite the fact that their respective party dominate their states. (I did a piece recently on how incumbent governors are a bit of an endangered species in this election.) In the Senate, the Democratic majority depends almost entirely on a number of endangered incumbents. That vulnerability, however, is more the result of sitting in bad states for Democrats at a time when Obama and the party more generally is more deeply unpopular than their status as incumbents.

But the reality is that even if a handful of governors lose and Senate incumbents in places like Louisiana, Arkansas, Alaska and Colorado are defeated, the vast majority of people who served in the 113th Congress will be back next January for the 114th Congress. In the past two decades, the reelection rate of House members seeking a new term has never dipped below 80 percent, according to the invaluable Vital Statistics on Congress.

So, yes, Americans think their elected officials are the equivalent of C- students, and if they could push a button and throw all the bums out, literally, they would do it. And yet, they don't -- or come anywhere close. The government we have is the government we deserve -- and not in a good way.