By John Cranford, CQ Columnist

In the end, few outside Washington probably cared that the joint deficit reduction committee gave up without a fight. And among those who did care, a number of them from both ends of the political spectrum cheered the demise of an effort they considered ill-conceived at best — and potentially dangerous to the economy at worst.

Oh, the pundits will rail that the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction refused to seize the opportunity to make a significant step toward fiscal responsibility. And the political class will offer its peculiarly twisted critiques designed to win elections — but not arguments.

Liberals will moan that Republican intransigence on taxes prevents Congress from righting a badly listing ship. (Or they will evoke the corollary that GOP lawmakers just kowtow to the rich who pay to keep them in office.)

Conservatives will carp that Democrats can’t bring themselves to be honest about the unsustainable future cost of a bloated federal government that will drag us all into bankruptcy. (Or their corollary: Democrats kowtow to organized labor and a cushy accumulation of government jobs that helps keep them entrenched.)

Meantime, the public will mostly yawn. The American people are bored with hand-wringing over gridlock and are unconvinced that there’s a crisis at hand — particularly when everyone knows a jobless worker and no one has ever met a person hit by a falling Treasury bond.

It’s easy to forget the voters’ culpability in this mess. But the fact is, they have been postponing the inevitable for some time by telling lawmakers not to make tough choices. They want their tax cuts and their Medicare benefits, too. And they elect the politicians who will guarantee both.

What’s perhaps most interesting is the disconnect between what Americans say about politicians — congressional approval ratings are at an all-time low, and President Obama doesn’t fare much better — and what they say about the issues of the day.

Although the public protests Washington’s inability to find a consensus on jobs, the economy, immigration, education, taxes, the deficit or just about any policy matter of consequence, there is plenty of evidence that people really aren’t paying that much attention.

This reality was reinforced last week in a Pew Research Center survey of which items in the news were drawing the most readers, viewers or listeners. The poll, conducted the week before the joint committee’s deadline to produce a $1.2 trillion deficit reduction plan, showed that a majority of Americans — almost three out of five — didn’t follow the news about the joint committee closely or at all.

A bare 3 percent of those surveyed said coverage of the panel’s deliberations in the week before the deadline was the most important story of that period to them. By contrast, 59 percent of those surveyed said they followed closely the sex-abuse scandal at Penn State University, and more than a quarter said that story was the most important. (As a side note, news about the economy was most important to 15 percent of those surveyed.)

This Is Why We Have Elections

Maybe this is as it should be. We have a representative democracy, after all. For all the vaunted “town hall” meetings that politicians use to orchestrate their campaign messages, few places in the country actually operate by plebiscite most of the time.