As we stagger through yet another tawdry election year, Americans agonize over the political paralysis that afflicts out nation. Much of that paralysis was self-inflicted in the name of "reform." Our escalating hatred of politicians and the political process was spawned in the Vietnam era and rapidly nurtured in the Watergate scandal. As a nation, we lost much more than a senseless war and a flawed chief executive, we lost faith in ourselves and in our system of governance.

We decided we would "reform" away the ugliness of the immediate past of authoritarian presidents who waged unpopular wars or who violated the law. We would do away with ancient congressional customs where seniority created a concentration of too much power in the hands of too few.

Presidential politics would be determined directly by the voice of the people. No more of these smoke-filled rooms where fat-jowled politicians would drink whiskey and gulp down some chile while trying to find a presidential nominee who could win in the fall. No sir, that was not democratic. Instead, there would be a series of exhausting and mostly boring primaries designed to produce a battered candidate most likely to lose in November. To reformers, glory is always in the process; victory is irrelevant.

Most of our political weight and effort would go to the primary in New Hampshire, a state which is about as typical of and relevant to the rest of the United States as Iceland. New Hampshire in February would be our national guiding light. California in June would be but a footnote.

We are now in the sixth presidential campaign conducted in the name of reform. Each of these campaigns has established a new low in substance, relevance and process. The reformers have insured that there will never be a need for an additional head on Mt. Rushmore.

Of course, Congress had to be reformed as well. In the House of Representatives, the class of '74 had 92 new members a colossal turnover. it was decided that power had to be widely shared. Most every Democratic member was to have his or her subcommittee, his or her piece of the action.

In the name of democracy, jurisdiction was purposefully crafted to overlap so that any significant bill would have to pass through 10 or more committees and subcommittees. Lots and lots of people were to have a little power instead of too few having too much. Anarchy was substituted for authoritarianism. In Washington the pendulum of power often swings in broad arcs from one extreme to the other.

The political process has been reformed into a system that produces inept presidents who don't have the capacity to govern and Congresses that can't untangle themselves from procedural deadlock. The political gridlock of today is more than the clash between two political parties staggering around in intellectual and procedural exhaustion. It is more than a clash between a Republican president and a Democratic Congress.

The political gridlock of today emerges from the scarred heart of our exhausted political system itself a political wallowing in special interest money and structured to produce the least both in personages and substance that our nation has to offer.