“Tell me how you are going to fix this problem first, this corrupt system, first,”

That's an ill-conceived question for several reasons.

First of all, politicians have very limited ability to fix problems. The best they can usually do is poke a complex social system such that, hopefully, everyone acts in a way that the problem gets fixed without creating new, worse problems.

Second, problems don't usually get "fixed". For instance, violence will never be zero. So you have to look at the situation with more judgement. For instance, violence has reduced so dramatically and so consistently that people from the past would probably consider the current situation "solved". A lot of discussion around gun control is confusingly about rifles (e.g. AR15), which only account for 200-300 murders per year; much less than knives or bare hands[1]. There are still gun violence problems in the US of course, but they are generally concentrated and probably better solved locally rather than asking Congress for a comprehensive solution. Health care is also a question of improvement rather than perfection -- no, it won't have a cost of zero; and no, it won't have a success rate of 100%.

Third, the question almost demands a simplistic answer that applies to everyone in the U.S., as absolute questions tend to do. There's no nuance of locality or role. Trying to find one solution that works well across such a diverse country often makes the problem harder to solve not easier.

Fourth, it implicitly neglects solutions that might not involve the level of government the candidate is running for; or where the government might play only a minor role; or where the government plays no role at all (e.g. veganism helps the environment a lot, but it's driven more by individual choice and culture than policy for the foreseeable future).

[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

In the U.S. right now, there's a major cultural divide bubbling up into a political divide. Let me turn the question around on the authors: "How is your framing is going to fix the cultural divide?".

There are ways to fix a cultural divide, but it takes effort and you have to try. Pushing politics first is effectively saying: "I don't know you or understand you, but I think I can collect a coalition majority to override you, so I don't care".

Our political problems exist on the spectrum of idealism and cynicism, not the spectrum of optimism and pessimism.

Only an idealist would expect such an appeal to have any impact on a system that people have mostly either accepted as inevitable or benefit from.