Why Smarter Politics?

During the 1988 presidential election, then senator and presidential candidate George H. W. Bush said “Read my lips, NO NEW TAXES”. Yet throughout his presidency, taxes were raised twice and by no small amounts. So why did Bush lie? Well, why do politicians lie? This can be traced back to the most fundamental principle of politics: if you tell people what they want to hear, you will earn their vote. If you fail to reach the masses with your rhetoric, however, you will be out with yesterday’s trash. And let’s be honest, the truth usually isn’t good news. 
    So why don’t politicians just lie outright, saying only what the masses want to hear and ignoring any negativities? The short answer is that there is too much risk involved with telling blatant lies. Because outright lies are easier to detect, the risk-reward factor is unfavorable thus disincentivizing this behavior. Instead, you will typically see distortion, exaggeration, misrepresentation, deception, half-truth and overstatement. The bottom line is that the general public is not educated enough to recognize more subtle forms of deception, and politicians have no issue exploiting this reality if it will earn them brownie points with their voters. Chances are that if a politician tells a blatant lie, they will be caught and exposed by the mainstream media, however, the media doesn’t earn much viewership out of exposing mere deception. Their audience, the general public, is simply not educated enough to recognize them, giving the media no incentive to expose these more subtle forms of deception. Every politician and each of their strategists know that lies make the news, deception does not. When politicians deceive, they know the odds of being caught lean heavily in their favor. Aside from this they also acknowledge that the risks are fairly nominal, as they will only lose a minimal amount of votes from those sharp enough to pick up on their deceptions. By resorting to exaggeration, misrepresentation, and half-truths, they can tell the public what they want to hear while at the same time minimizing their risks. It is because of this that politicians do not win elections on the basis of their creative policy innovations. Politicians do not win on previous accomplishments. Politicians don’t even win elections based on their potential as leaders. Rather, we the people have forfeited the ability to elect the most qualified and capable leaders in our country by allowing our elections to become glorified popularity contests. If you have ever looked down at your ballot and scratched your head looking for a good choice, you have come to understand the implications of this the hard way. 
    There is only one group of people who can stop politicians from using deceptive tactics and focusing on making policy decisions that will improve the lives of the public: the voters themselves. The best way to stop the use of deceptive tactics in politics is to educate ourselves to the point where politicians are no longer incentivized to deceive us. Public education means regularly exposing and analyzing instances of deception and cultivating a clear understanding of topics being discussed in the political sphere. If the public were to see and recognize specific examples of deception on a consistent basis, they would start to build their own eye for it. With a widespread grounding in the basic concepts of how government and politics work, they would be able to recognize misinformation on their own and pass their knowledge along to others. Once this educated voter base grows through education, politicians will abandon the corrupt strategy of building their voter base through deception and will shift their efforts to accomplishing real policy changes in the pursuit of election.
    In order to do my part in solving this problem, I seek to build this website as a platform for political education. With a focus on analyzing examples of political deception and providing objective background information on political ideas, we are given the chance to eliminate deception as a tool of our government. Through this platform, we can all do our best to encourage Smarter Politics.