The dreary political ads continued in 15- or 30-second sound bites, minute after weary minute, hour after hour, contradicting one another, sometimes within seconds of one another. No one was delighted with them with the possible exception of the television stations that reaped the revenue and the production companies that filmed them.

Few of them were paid for by the candidates. Most of them were paid for by political action committees that raised an obscene amount of money to influence Maine’s byelection, on both sides of the political fence.

Most of that lovely money — some five million dollars’ worth — was the result of the Citizens United decision, which ruled that political speech and money are interchangable, and repeated the convenient fiction that corporations are persons and are entitled to the same basic civil rights of natural persons.

Convenient if you happen to be a corporation, that is. Corporations get the benefits of personhood, but none of its unfortunate side effects. A corporation cannot be convicted of a crime and sent to jail, for instance, and it is very unlikely that any of its high-ranking officers will suffer this fate, either.

Nationwide, more than a billion dollars raised by PACs will be spent to influence 40 percent of the voting population — the ones who will bother to cast a ballot — and those sent to Washington and increasingly, state houses around the country will be more polarized, more partisan, and less able to cross the line to work together.

Are we getting our money’s worth? Obviously not. Imagine what good could be done with $5 million in our state alone. How many students would that money educate? How many people would get health care? How many hungry children would it feed? How many roads or bridges would that repair? Or, how much of a property tax break would residents get if that amount was channeled into municipal coffers through revenue sharing?

The problem is money, and the need to raise that money to compete in elections. And by holding elections every two years, there is a never-ending election cycle that saps the will of our representatives to govern, especially when an election approaches.

Is there a solution? Yes, there is, and while it may seem radical, it’s a purely political, American solution to a perennial problem involving money, influence, and election spending.

First, whether we are in a state house or Congress, the White House or the Blaine House, establish one single term for every person working for us.

Make it long. Make all of the terms end in a presidential election year, every eight years. Do away with the midterms altogether.

Federally, the president should get eight solid years. House members, 16 years. Senators, 24 years. Governors, eight years. State legislators, 16 years. The terms would be staggered so that only half of the House and state legislatures are new at any given time, and a third of the Senate.

Voters get the right to recall their legislators and members of Congress through a process that would be onerous enough to avoid spurious recalls, but available for egregious offenses. States that do not have an impeachment provision in place or a Lieutenant governorship must have them for their governors. The president could be impeached by the House and removed from office by the Senate, but this warning would apply: The Vice President would be installed for the remainder of the president’s term and eight years of his or her own term, so the opposing party should probably think twice before starting the procedure.

After leaving office, no one would be able to work for any company directly or indirectly whose interests he or she voted for in Congress for a period of 10 years. If someone voted on a bill that affected Monsanto, they’d be forbidden from working for Monsanto or representing Monsanto in any way. They’d also be excluded from the people who could work for the government to set regulations on companies like Monsanto.

Redistricting would be done not by the state legislatures, but by a non-partisan organization, based on and agreed-upon set of objective criteria, such as population changes, as it is supposed to be done.

Then, the most important thing. We constitutionally do away with “corporate personhood” except for ennumerated items, such as signing a contract or engaging in a lease. Lobbyists can still come to visit lawmakers to redress grievances — but they hold no promises and wield no political power.

We ban any outside spending on elections whatsoever, and pay for it ourselves as taxpayers. That way, the people our representatives should be … representing … are the only moneyed interest in the game. The amount spent would be based on the cost of media in the market from Labor Day and Election Day — candidates from New York will have to spend more than candidates from Wyoming, for instance. Congress and state houses recess the day after election day and do not begin work again until the new term opens in January, to avoid lame duck shenannigans.

In one amendment, this suggestion would strip corporate and PAC money from elections, prevent representatives from getting soft benefits, such as the promise of a job to come, to do a corporation’s bidding, and give the people only the role of watchdog over our legislators. We would also remove from legislators the pressing need to get reelected, giving them enough time to do what their consciences and constituents want to see happen in Congress and in state legislatures around the country.

This won’t be easy to do. It will involve amending the state and federal constitutions. The two-party system will hate it, because it opens up the potential of third parties and non-partisans getting a voice in the process. But it’s worth a try, and it certainly beats the other American option we tried … the Civil War. Imagine that you had woken up Wednesday morning and there had been no election at all, nor had there been one in 2012 or 2010. Nice feeling, isn’t it?