And it's our fault.
I'm writing this diary because I keep reading over and over within other diary posts that people are supporting candidate ________ because of their recent speech about _____ where they promised _______ and that they'd never support ________ because they are diametrically opposed to their position on ________.
As much as I respected someone like Dennis Kucinich for his detailed and concrete plans to actually enact change, the lesson we should have learned here is that no matter how sophisticated and issue oriented we try to be as voters, the entire thing still comes down to gut feeling and we have in fact designed the process we are stuck with today. We want our eventual candidates to be evasive.
I'm going to direct this hypothesis towards Barack Obama because he's my current choice for the Democratic presidential nominee after Edwards left the race.
It is my utter belief that much of what Obama is telling us right now is a scripted lie and I am in no way putting him down for it. The American voting populace requires it of him and he is at the moment intelligently playing out a role that could result in a winning campaign. (Note: I could and would be saying the same things about Hillary.)
In a way the con job is reassuring because, if I truly believed he would accomplish all in his platform and I bought into the persona he was publicly displaying, I would probably be upset. We disagree on many of his methods of solving the complex problems facing our country.
Truth be told, the President of the United States, unless he goes beyond the bounds of the Constitution as Bush has done, has very little power to actually do many of the things any of the candidates are proposing. In a lot of ways they simply get to ride along the tide of history waiting to react to the unexpected events that always blindside us.
The economy for the most part has a mind of its own. An government can cause small ripples in the overall giant sine wave of ups and downs. Any person can look at graphs over long enough periods of time and see that the cycle cannot be broken. All anyone can do is to change somewhat the extents of the peaks and valleys and yet political fortunes rise and fall on the luck of falling into the right place on the roller coaster.
Our Presidents are required as well in their personal lives to have strong Christian beliefs, not by our system of laws but instead by the pressure brought on by the majority of voters. Obama or any of the candidates for that matter could have turned away from a belief in God years ago or never possessed one but it would be political suicide for one of them to let that be public knowledge. I would love an atheist or agnostic nominee. This is one area where I hope Obama is lying and I would completely rationalize the falsehood.
All of the Democratic candidates I hope are lying about their intentions in regards to nationalized health care because they're scared to death of the label of "socialist" that will be attached to them if they come out with the only system that can work. In my mind that is a complete removal of private health insurance companies from the picture and doctors being paid an annual salary for their work. There is no way a new system can take on all the people it must insure and still allow private enterprise to eat away so much of each health care dollar. Obviously that can't occur overnight and some system must be devised where it is phased in slowly. The candidates must know how it has to look in the end and none of them are saying it. The voting public would not allow them to.
Iraq is lost and forever broken. No matter how the current surge works out there will be chaos when the bulk of American troops leave the area and a huge amount of blood will spill and yet those troops must come out if for no other reason than their presence is bankrupting our country. Nothing anyone does can stop that and no candidate can come out and tell the voting public the unvarnished truth on this. This is probably the soul reason I'm going with Obama from this time forward. Any person that had the forethought to see the potential failure in Iraq during the patriotic fervor prior to the invasion obviously can see the horrific ending we face. I forgive him for not destroying his candidacy by telling us that.
Taxes. We all know that our deficit economy can only be fixed by some combination of increased revenue and decreased spending. Somebody's taxes have to go up. Both the Democrats and the Republicans know it no matter what anyone is espousing. We voters require above all that our elected officials lie about this to our faces. The truth in this issue is a guaranteed loss.
Hope/Change/Bi-partisanship. Obama's not stupid or he would not be the eloquent public official he is today. I am assuming that he is lying in regard to these issues as well and quite pleased if that is the case. Hope is great for votes but it must be mixed with realism. I am certain Obama has elements of both. Pushing the latter in front of the former is a sure death in the polls. Change is also a noble goal. An intelligent person of Obama's stature didn't get there by not understanding the human dynamic. People scream for change but hate it while it's happening. It must occur slowly and naturally. Bi-partisanship is also an issue for Obama that I truly hope he is overselling because he knows it feels good to us. He could not have attained the status he has in his own party if he did not use its power against political polar opposites. My guess is he's much more a fighter than his message gives out.
So here's my plea to you as fellow citizens and voters. Go with your candidate not only because of the shrouded issues they expose but also because of those intangibles you sense that we will not allow them to talk about. Remember that 80% of the role of the President is to motivate and react, not to create legislation. Stop vetoing a candidate because of your one wedge issue. My guess is you really don't know that person's true views on it. They just had to come up with something to fill in the hole in their resume. Truth is, they probably don't know themselves.
Maybe someday we'll actually have a man that on his first day in office sits us down and explains who he had to become to get there. It would be eye-opening.