Well, I hope we can change that, Steven.

But during campaigns we willingly suspend laws of gravity and shelflife.

Even the Who got tired of playing Tommy and Lynyrd Skynyrd sick of Freebird, and those were real, to use a rather stale term, "rock stars". (God knows what Sinatra thought about "New York, New York" and "My Way".)

In fact, I'm old enough to remember when supermodels became supermodels, and we no longer had to go to dive bars to see bad chick bands in skimpy outfits - we could just watch fashion runway shows and cut to the chase.

But every so often, actually every 4 years, people come pounding on our doors and start expecting us to get excited about politicians, or should I say "non-politicians", like the ones bred outside of Washington.

(This is actually rather nonintuitive and even perverse, because you can kind of imagine why someone who's from Washington would get into politics, but why someone from say Kansas? Why not hitchhike to Hollywood, Baja, Bali, Puna, Peshawar, even Jonestown?)

And then once the election's over, we get back to "business as usual" in Washington. Of course "business as usual" is just as stale as the other mundane lines, but with a lot more money thrown in. Hmmmm, maybe there is a point to hitching to Washington after all.

Which kind of brings me to my point, assuming I did have one. I'm reasonably cynical about the whole process. I'm quite willing to admit, "yeah, my candidate is kinda sucky". But then the other shoe drops. "But so is yours". And I expect to start bargaining over just how sucky our candidates are. Which in a 5-person race should get to a lot of heated debate over just exactly how sucky our candidates our, and whether being down and ahead with suckiness is good or bad, and allow us to consume great amounts of alcohol.

And then someone says "My candidate doesn't suck". And I look at him with the same disdain and admiration for people who go into sewage pits to wrestle with alligators. "You said what?", meaning "The Pope had an affair with a whole troupe of *WHAT*?" "My canidate doesn't suck". And while we're slightly off the original import of your post here, you can imagine that the idea of a candidate that doesn't mostly but not completely suck is relatively common, the idea of a candidate that "doesn't suck" is about up there with a candidate that doesn't tell stale jokes (or worse, stale inspirational lines). Ohmigod, I must write my mother and thank her for sending those really cute Johnny Carson clips.

I mean, we all laugh at dumb jokes, just like we could all probably golf if someone held a gun to our heads. But I've said for a long time that we pay our politicians well, and by that I mean including the kickbacks and free dinners at The Palm, to take on the burdens of this completely stale and sucky life, to spare us from the truly irritating and depressing and might I hazard "suicide inducing" details of wonkdom. Go check out Obsidian Wings' multiple correlated variated breakdowns of the 2 remaining candidates' votes to get my drift. Aside from dedicating numerous post offices over the course of their careers, you get the candidates obsessing over numerous noble and futile initiatives that would fill ESPN with Sundays of Extreme Boredom programming, especially in light of the fact that these jackasses haven't quite realized that they've been out of power these last 7 years and that no one (in their right mind at least) reads the Congressional Record.

So, thank you for noticing that the lines have gotten a bit stale, and when you finish rolling the mannequins off the stage, please turn out the lights and make sure the security door is fully shut.

Of course it is a stale line. It has been a stale line for YEATS! Every single election in modern times has been about changing how things work in Washington, and not a single winner ever has managed to do that! Obama won't manage it either. That's just how it is. If the general citizenry really cared about changing things, Bush would have been impeached by now.
Nah, it's all just politics and that isn't going to change.