1hundredsixty8

The preseason has started! It’s all over the media- TV, websites, blogs. Pundits- with or without qualifications- are picking their favorites. Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com will be giving us statistical analyses. Head for your sofa, kids.

Of course, I’m talking about the 2016 Presidential election, not the National Football League. It is easy to confuse the two since the media covers each in much the same way. For the most part, I ignore the preseason NFL and wait until the actually season starts to pay attention. The campaign, fifteen months in advance of the election, is a whole other thing.

There are the obvious attractions: Donald Trump's bloviating, a platoon of candidates on the GOP side, Hillary Clinton’s multiple difficulties, Bernie Sander’s left-handed populism. What I find most intriguing are the fantastical statements some of the candidates make, bizarre beyond the hyperbolic politi-speak to which we are accustomed. To wit:

-      Promises by various Republicans to spur GDP growth well beyond historical averages. This began with Jeb Bush’s promise to grow the economy at a 4% annual rate. Mike Huckabee, in the best traditions of televangelism, channeled a higher power and claimed his Administration would bring us 6% growth. The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell aptly satirized these delusions in her August 17^th Opinion piece.

-      The ridiculous Trump plan to deport the children of undocumented immigrants who were born in this country. Somehow, Mr. Trump, who claims to be “very,very smart”, has no knowledge of the Fourteenth Amendment.

-      Dr. Ben Carson’s claim that Planned Parenthood targeted black women for abortion services as a means of controlling the black population. He produced no evidence.

The apparent goal of such statements is to inculcate unsubstantiated claims and even bald-face lies into the political discourse with the hope, it is assumed, of gaining an edge in the campaign. We live in the era of talking points, of 140-character tweets, of two-and-a-half minute TV videos. Contemporary politicians realize they can say anything and usually get away with it. Mr. Trump is the prime example, but most do it at some point.

The calculus is simple: The bulk of the population is what is euphemistically termed “low information voters”. These are people with little or no interest in complex policy issues, people to whom simplistic policy prescriptions are just “common sense”. You can tell these people anything: The Affordable Care Act is a ‘government take-over of healthcare’ (it isn’t); cutting taxes leads to economic growth (It hasn’t. See Kansas and Wisconsin). The point is, in the face of national mass attention-deficit disorder, you can make outlandish statements and be secure that you will not pay too much of a political price, if any.

Then there is the cohort that considers itself politically informed, mostly by talk radio or their preferred cable ‘news’ outlets. Since I believe a person’s politics most often stem from emotion (as opposed to reason), these people gravitate towards sources of ‘information’ with which they are emotionally predisposed to agree (the Fox News-MSNBC dichotomy), an intellectual comfort zone. As with the apathetic and the uninformed, these people are fond of dumbed-down descriptions of the issues and the concomitant solutions that are offered. With a bewildering volume of information directed as us every day, it is little wonder that many seek concrete answers to the issues of a complicated society. The unfortunate outcome of this mindset is the reification of absurd positions (the Birther movement, for instance).

Perhaps it is foolish to expect our politicians to be more frank with us about issues and answers. Politics has traditionally been as artistic as technocratic. In the nation’s history, the best of our leaders gave us clear, concise rationales for sophisticated policies; Lincoln and FDR come immediately to mind. They did not tell us the entire story, but they avoided outright prevarication. But that was before this modern era of incessant polling, of focus groups and data analysis. Politicians have forgotten about the art, but not about obscuring the truth. You know the question:

“How do you know a politician is lying?”

“His lips are moving.”