The folly of campaign speeches

The off-year elections are still more than a year away and the next Presidential election is more than three years out but presidential hopefuls are already invading Iowa. They're at county fairs and the State Fair. They're at birthday and anniversary parties. Wherever a potential 2016 voter might be, the candidates are there too.

And they all make speeches. That's the thing about politicians you know. They love to hear themselves talk. They'll talk to thousands or a handful or just to themselves in a mirror. It makes no difference to them because they have all the answers to all the problems all the time. They're bloated on their over-sized egos, believing they're the only ones who can solve the problems a vast, multi-racial and multi-cultural country like ours faces.

But there's great folly in their rhetoric. To prove this point, all one has to do is watch a debate, especially a presidential debate. And it doesn't make any difference whether it's a Democratic debate or a Republican debate because the one thing politicians have in common is that they'll say whatever they think they need to say to get elected. This means bending the truth, shading the truth and outright lying and we, the people, fall for it every time.

There's very little a single elected official, especially one at the national level, can do on their own. A newly elected U.S. Senator, for example, takes a seat at the back of the chamber and gets the worst office space available. He or she quickly finds out the rules of the Senate restricts what they can say, what they can do and what kind of committees they can serve on. Senator Deb Fisher is finding that out this year. Senators often must serve for decades before they can be elected to a committee chairmanship. But if you listened to their campaign speeches before the election, you would think the only chance to save America would be to elect them.

Sen. Barack Obama was a strong, vocal opponent of Gitmo, the covert monitoring of private American citizens and the use of drones as killing machines. But as president, he has embraced all three. He didn't support those things in his campaign speeches. In fact, he opposed them but he switched sides after being elected. Many more people have been killed by drones since Obama became President than were killed during the Bush Presidency, a fact that's hard to reconcile with many of his Democratic supporters.

We keep falling for this because we have no other option. That's the way the American political system has worked since its inception. People run against other people, they say whatever they think they need to say to get elected and then, if they DO get elected, they do what they want to do instead of what they said they would do. That's one of the reasons I've long contended that low voter turnout is good. Much of the electorate is so fed up with the process that they've refused to participate in it any more. The dark side of that reality is that when you drop out, you open the door for the fringe elements of American politics to have a greater say and that's exactly what's happened in recent years, both on the right and the left.

People talk about the need for a third political party but that's not ever going to happen either, at least not to the extent that they could win a national election. We are a two party country and, unless something drastic happens to change that dynamic, we always will be. So Democrats say the right things to their supporters, Republicans the right things to theirs and each side hopes they have enough votes to win.

We all know that the make-up of voters in this country is rapidly changing and both sides are jockeying for position to win that vote. For example, Spanish-language network Univision hit the number one spot in TV viewers aged 18 to 49 last month, beating out Fox, NBC, and CBS. The Hispanic advertising industry is now worth more than five billion dollars and is growing four times faster than other advertising sectors (Harvard Business Review).

Realizing this, the Republicans are softening their views on immigration after years of maintaining the hardest line possible. They've even toned down their rhetoric on border security, partly because we have fewer illegal entries in this country now that we've had in the last couple of decades. The point here is that Hispanics vote and in the last Presidential election, they voted overwhelmingly for Obama. The Republicans know that to have any chance of winning a presidential election in the near future, they have to modify their stance on immigration to appease Mexican immigrants or die at the ballot box. So that's what they're doing, at least in their talk. But, if they get elected, will their actions support their words?

As is the case with most politicians, probably not.