How should we respond to "profound gloom"

I note the concluding paragraph from today's column by the rightly respected Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne.  The column is notionally on the McConnell-Grimes Senate race in Kentucky, but the subtext is brought to the fore in the conclusion: 

The backdrop of this election is a profound gloom about the state of our continuing national experiment in self-government. That’s why politics here — but in many other places, too — is moving toward nuclear winter. Is it naive to ask if there is still a market somewhere for hope? 

Needless to say, I share Dionne's sense of "profound gloom," though where we differ is that much of my own gloom comes from the continuing inability of the punditry to suggest that one reason for the loss of faith in "our continuing national experiment in self government" is the dysfunctionality of the Constitution itself.  To be sure, that can't explain the problems occurring in "many other places," though it is not entirely beside the point that many of these "other places" might be in better shape if the United States were capable of responding adequately to the problems facing all states in our globalized political order. 

What is most pervasive, perhaps, is the ever extending polarization, which means not only that "We the People" have strikingly different views on a plethora of important topics, but, perhaps more importantly, that there is no longer a genuine "We the People" because each of the polarized sides increasingly sees their opponents not as fellow citizens but as Others to be demonized.  And, as Dionne notes, that will certainly be a major motif of the Kentucky election.  For better or worse, we are not divided on a completely sectional basis, which would make peaceful secession perhaps a thinkable possibility, nor (undoubtedly for better) are we threatened by genuine civil war because of the divisions.  Instead, our national polity is like a Thanksgiving from hell, in which the members of the family stare at each other with daggers, insult one another, and then get drunk, while everyone resolves to try to be elsewhere come next Thanksgiving.

It would be foolish to believe that a new convention (as contemplated, never forget, by Article V) would necessarily be the cure for what ails us, but taking the possibility seriously would at least provide a start to the long overdue conversation that we continue not to have, since it's so much more fun to denounce Mitch McConnell (or Barack Obama) than to wrestle with the political structures that have brought them (and maintain them) in power. 

I'm not saying anything really new, so I hope, perhaps naively, that there will not be just more of the same old, same old points made in the comments.  What I'm really interested in is whether anyone does not share the "profound gloom" that Dionne evokes and, if not, the basis of the relative optimism.  E.g., do any of you looking forward to McConnell's becoming Senate Majority Leader really and truly believe that that will make much of a difference, given Obama's retention of the veto power?  To be sure, he will find it ever harder to name anyone to office, but is that a source of real "hope" about resolving our problems.  And do any of you looking forward to McConnell's defeat and Democratic retention of the Senate really believe that Congress will address any of the issues you regard as most important in the remaining two year's of Obama's term (assuming, of course, that the Republicans continue to hold the House, but would a, say, five-vote Democratic margin in the House change your analysis all that much)?