Here’s an old joke most of us have heard:

Q:    How can you tell when politicians are lying?
A:    Their lips are moving.

Here’s not-a-joke that most people don’t know:

Q:    Why do politicians lie?
A:    Because voters will not tolerate truth from politicians.

Bear with me as I take a somewhat roundabout way of demonstrating my point.

While it may not enjoy the status of a logical fallacy, it is, nevertheless, a case of faulty reasoning to assume that other people, most people or any people view the world as you do and share your goals and ambitions.  This was driven home to me in the late 1970′s when I offered a keypunch operator (those younger than 40 may have to look up this term) an opportunity for professional advancement.  Her response was that she had quit her previous job because they forced her to leave keypunching and do something else.  I realized that, simply because I was ambitious and regarded keypunching as the worst job on the entire planet, it did not follow that my employee saw things as I did.

Along the same line, during my 22-year career as a political consultant, I learned how to disassociate myself from reality and view the political world as most voters see it.

• It’s boring.  On rare occasions voters perceive that their personal hides may be at stake in the outcome of an election (1932 – Hoover v Roosevelt and 2008 are strong contenders) but our system of government is so successful that this level of fear is rare.
• It’s time-consuming.  Politics forces people to attend to matters that require something more than room-temperature IQ’s and compels them to spend precious time away from their childrens’ educations, professional advancement, domestic harmony and re-runs of The Survivor.  Most voters perceive this investment in Time as a fairly comprehensive waste of same.  I am known as a champion of this attitude and have frequently advised people that no election is as important as their child’s parent-teacher conference.  I agree with the sentiment expressed by the late Eugene McCarthy, “Being good at politics is like being good at football:  you have to be smart enough to do it well, and dumb enough to think it’s important”.
• It doesn’t matter.  The relative lack of participation in elections is evidence that most people simply aren’t interested and are sufficiently secure that they can afford to ignore it.  After all, when was the last time someone was executed for voting for the wrong person?  At the other extreme, they feel a sense of helplessness so profound that participation in elections seems, to them, an utter waste of time.  If asked to list what is personally important to most Americans, politics would probably rank below any professional sports venue, the martial woes of Brad Pitt and the threat of a new Wall-Mart in their community.

When a politician gussies himself up for an engagement with his particular polity, the primary rule in force is that American voters select AGAINST politicians.  Therefore, every  time he opens his mouth and allows a fixed opinion to fall out, he is providing some segment of the electorate with sufficient reason to vote for the other guy.  He can do nothing himself to retrieve the lost votes; the best he can hope for is that his opponent will utter something even more offensive and hand them back.  That’s why your average, disconnected voter perceives elections as the lesser of two evils.  The fact of the matter is that the only person with whom he is in 100% agreement is himself and he isn’t running.

I never attempted to tell my candidate clients what their opinion on various issues should be – that would be pointless and offensive.  Instead, I totted-up the “political cost” of any given position.  Most of them were local candidates and grappled with heart-stoppers like potholes, traffic congestion, property taxes, local crime, land use, education and scandal.  If my client pronounced herself fully in support of as much graft and scandal as possible, I could inform her that 100% of the electorate disagreed with her and would likely support our opponent.  (Nevertheless, I know of one candidate who was convicted of stealing from a church charity fund and still received 17% of the primary vote.)

Be patient a bit longer.  Public opinion polls frequently “kitchen test” issue positions to determine the electorates’ collective opinion.  Here is another truism of politics:  As the split among voters on a particular issue approaches 50 : 50, the usefulness of that issue diminishes proportionally because equal numbers of voters are alike attracted and disaffected by any given opinion.  Likewise, as the split approaches 0 : 100, its usefulness diminishes because only a knothead would advocate something that the vast majority of the electorate condemns.  The most useful issues split the electorate somewhere between 60 : 40 and 75 : 25 and astute candidates must be on the high end to succeed.

One more building block.  Political professionals use models of voter behavior much as economists model economic behavior.  The models are useless in any attempt to predict the vote of any individual voter, but they are quite useful in predicting the behavior of a mass of voters.  Like most social science models, they utilize absolutes; thus, the capitalist model in economics assumes perfect price knowledge for both buyers and sellers.  This does not exist in the real world, but its presence in the model serves to eliminate those annoying instances of individual idiocy (or wisdom) which render models less useful.  Part of the political model assumes that voters want everything that government can provide and wish to pay nothing for it.  This applies to all political matters, regardless of monetary cost.  Voters want perfect roads at no cost.  They want to maintain legal abortion without the unpleasant reality of abortion.  Murderers must be executed without anyone actually pulling the switch.  Welfare, the rescue of abducted children, drug abuse elimination and national health care must be achieved without dipping into any particular voter’s wallet.

The calculus of the matter works like this:  If politician A tells voter B that objective C cannot be achieved without a pound of flesh from taxpayer D (or B), then politician A is toast.  On the other hand, if politician X tells voters that objective Y can be achieved at a price of Z(ero), he will sail on to electoral victory.  This is a useful model – not a perfect description.  It is also a lie – one that voters respond to with votes.

Voters, collectively, will not tolerate truth from politicians.  Voters want to be told sweet, sweet lies.  Voters were gung-ho about kicking Saddam Hussein out of Iraq until they realized that American lives would have to be spent in the effort and, perhaps, for a considerable time going forward.  They like low interest rates when they borrow money but loathe them when they live on fixed incomes.  Americans want traffic safety but cannot abide traffic signal cameras that photograph them when they run one.  We want absolute security and absolute privacy; medications that are 100% guaranteed, gold-plated and copper-bottomed at a price of less than $1.00 per dozen;  a legal system that incarcerates all actual and potential felons without offending any of them or inconveniencing any of us.  We want to drive SUVs, pay less than $2.00 per gallon to gas them up and breathe pristine-pure air.  We want to increase spending on (take your pick) the military, education, social welfare, the environment, health care, senior citizens, young people, the middle class, the poor, everyone, without increasing taxes or reducing funds for any of the others.

As a mass, voters are idiots and politicians rightfully treat them as such.  They will not deal with you as adults until you reason and behave as adults.  Until then, the lies will continue because the market (spelled Y-O-U) demand them.

In 1984, Democrat Walter Mondale confronted incumbent Republican Ronald Reagan.  Mondale said that, if elected, he would raise taxes to counter the staggering deficits of Reagan.  He also said that Reagan would raise taxes but was not sufficiently honest to tell voters so during the campaign.  Mondale suffered the worst defeat of any Democratic candidate in history and Reagan raised taxes in his second administration.

American voters are suckers.  Politicians will continue to lie until you express (through actual ballots – not opinion polls)  a desire to behave rationally.  How we do it is detailed in part two of this essay.  It is ridiculously simple and cost-effective.