1974, JANUARY 30TH, USA, WASHINGTON, DEMONSTRATION AGAINST NIXON Photo: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images

Every week, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich talks with contributor Eric Benson about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: a poll showing that Americans blame Washington leaders for their lingering economic anxieties, what the new border-security bill means for Republicans, and what to do when political news gets you down.

A new Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll shows an America so discontented with the state of the nation and its leaders that you can’t help but notice some echoes with the disconsolate Watergate summer of 1974, when Nixon resigned the presidency, 40 years ago this month. Are any of the similarities real?

This poll is bleak indeed. The percentage of American adults who doubt their children will have better lives than they do is at an all-time high (76). Nearly four fifths of those polled are discontented with the American political system. With the exception of the military and “high-tech industry,” every other institution, from the Supreme Court to public schools, has lost the confidence of a majority of the public. Obama’s approval rating is 40 percent; Congressional Republicans are at 19 percent; and Congress as a whole is at 14 percent. There is no good news for anyone in the entire survey with the possible exception of Apple.

Perhaps because Rick Perlstein’s new history of American dyspepsia from 1973 to 1976, The Invisible Bridge, is so freshly in my head, it’s hard not to notice similarities to the funk of that era: Vast economic uncertainty; the absence of leadership and governance in a polarized Washington; continued revelations of CIA crimes, from torture to illegal surveillance; the citizenry’s disillusionment with unpopular, failed wars. This week’s Afghanistan tragedy — the killing of the two-star Army general Harold J. Greene, the highest-ranking American casualty abroad since Vietnam — will only further sour an American public that wants us out of there yesterday. It was apparently not a Taliban attack but an inside job within the Afghan army that America has sacrificed so much to train. You begin to wonder if an escape-by-helicopter scenario like our ignominious departure from Saigon in 1975 is not in store.

Obama’s approval rating, depressed as it is, is not Nixonian, of course, and Obama is no Nixon, Sarah Palin’s calls for impeachment and John Boehner’s lawsuit notwithstanding. There will always be only one Nixon, the bigoted, paranoid, corrupt, and vindictive character who is now popping back out of the grave with the release of new books anthologizing still more of his often riveting White House recordings, which often sound like a cross between Goodfellas and Samuel Beckett. But if we have no Watergate in Washington this summer, there is at least a delightfully venal political scandal to follow across the Potomac: the corruption trial of the former Virginia governor, Robert McDonnell, and his wife Maureen, accused of taking cash and other trinkets in exchange for promoting the “diet supplements” of a low-rent businessman. This soap opera has everything, from an unidentified “male model” to Bible group meetings to telltale goods bearing brand names like Rolex and Oscar de la Renta. It may not be the stuff of Woodward and Bernstein, but the Washington Post’s ongoing coverage of the McDonnells’ trial offers some of the summer’s most reliable comic relief.