The American political system is intentionally slow and only capable of incremental change. Look at just about any "big" reform in U.S. history and you'll actually find decades of gradual developments augmenting an initial, insufficient bill. Even life-changing things like Social Security and Medicare weren't ratified in the modern state overnight. Nobody wants to admit that, though. Whoever's proposing a bill has to act like it's going to change the country immediately and forever because saying, "This will lay the groundwork for decades of slow reform" isn't sexy enough to get votes. At the same time, opponents of a bill can't act like it's just one baby step in a new direction that can easily be altered in a variety of ways down the line. Instead, they have to make every proposal they oppose into the falling sky of government action. This is The Noise, the shouting above reason that obscures truths and details for the sake of political grandstanding. Consider the following:

The American Jobs Act is the only way to save the U.S. economy!

...except that a significant portion of its success is predicated on prospective savings that are a combination of predictive tax revenue numbers, assumptions about what citizens will do with the money they earn from the bill and in some cases estimates pulled out of thin air to make the bill seem like anything other than the gamble it truly is. In reality, we can't pay for the American Jobs Act and it's far from guaranteed to improve anything.

The American Jobs Act is just another series of bailouts and unnecessary government spending!

...though maybe we ought to consider the fact that the current Republican jobs plan basically amounts to "do nothing". Whatever bills the GOP in Congress have supported vis. the economy have been Band-Aids for a severed head. One cannot hang one's hat on a 3% Ways and Means withholding agreement while simultaneously denying the need for massive reform and focus on jobs creation and hope to be called a supporter of serious economic growth.

Obama's workaround waivers for states that want to abandon No Child Left Behind are expensive and cumbersome to implement!

...if you're a state like Texas that has doggedly avoided meeting national standards for either college or work preparatory curricula in schools. One would think Texas of all places would be thrilled with an opportunity to throw off the shackles of a federal regulation in favor of state-determined programs, seeing as the GOP still likes to pretend that it believes in state's rights. That narrative goes sour when the state is actually required to take care of its own people and create a school curriculum that makes its students not just competitive but competent compared to students from other states.

The new trade deals with South Korea, Colombia and Panama are suspect because of foreign currency issues!

...which Congress didn't seem to mind for the many years similar trade agreements existed with those nations prior to their lapse in 2008. It's hardly a coincidence the U.S. economy has hit its roughest patch in the years when Congress has done jack-all to make international trade possible. The new agreements aren't perfect and they run some risk, but if we wait for a trade deal that carries no risk at all we might as well shut down the stock market, close the ports and go back to being an agrarian society. The new agreements create billions in new export business. Complaining that it might be $9 billion instead of $12 billion is all kinds of silly.

But what about the human rights issues concerning workers in those trade deal countries!?!

It is not and should not be the prerogative of the United States Congress to police the ethics of other cultures. That's the sort of thing that gets us embroiled in pointless wars and costs us trade opportunities in a time of economic crisis. The people of other nations are not infants. They can and do fight for their own rights, though we don't usually see the battle on our national news networks.

There's plenty of noise in modern American political discourse and most of it is an attempt to turn nuanced issues surrounding gradual progress into either/or, life-and-death situations. There is no perfect solution to anything in politics, only a lot of complicated, not-at-all sexy realism.