Barack Obama has it right. My campaign polls, triangulates, and tests opinions so I end up telling voters what they want to hear instead of what they need to hear.
It’s what good politicians do.
In the entire Democratic presidential campaign to date, has Barack Obama ever told a crowd something they do not want to hear? Of course not. If he won’t do it, I won’t do it.
Running a nationwide campaign requires each candidate to be pragmatic and deal with the realities of politics. One of those implicit realities is that we only tell voters what we have polled, tested, triangulated, and agree is what they want to hear.
Do voters want to hear trash talk about Bush and Iraq? Of course, so I don’t disappoint anyone. Do voters know that we need to improve health care by increasing coverage and reducing costs? Of course, that’s what I tell voters because that’s what they want to hear.
Is it my fault they don’t ask the follow up questions like, “Uh, how will you increase coverage and reduce costs?” Hell if I know, but nobody asks, so I don’t worry about it.
Magicians have some kind of code that prohibits them from disclosing the details of their sleight-of-hand tricks. Politicians have no code, so everything is fair game. Most of the voters in any given election are in the middle, Democrats are on the left, Republicans are on the right, and as the campaign moves toward the election, both of us veer to the middle, in some kind of mirror image swoop on the electorate.
We do that by starting off a campaign by telling the fringe voters, the extremists, what they want to hear. Once they’re on board, politicians shift gears toward the center to pick up more support by telling those voters what they want to hear, even if what they want to hear is a little different than what we, the politicians running for office, just said.
Politicians tell voters what they want to hear. It’s what we do. Fortunately, for politics as a career, most voters don’t pay attention, and those that do can’t remember what they ate for breakfast yesterday.
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