Random Acts of Writing: Promises made and the real world
By Craig Carter
Thursday, February 21, 2008 10:19 AM PST
There are campaign promises, and then there’s the real world. A man runs for president, promising to be “a uniter, not a divider,” then when he reaches office, his party doesn’t want him to unite with what they see as the pitchfork-wielding, horned devils from the other side, while the devils from the other side don’t particularly want to unite with a president they see as only slightly smarter than a sack of lug nuts. The truth is, the president’s detractors aren’t devils and the president surely isn’t stupid, but there’s politics, and then there’s the real world, and (oftentimes) nary the twain shall meet.
There are campaign promises, and then there’s the real world.
A presidential candidate says he wants to remove most American troops from Iraq by the end of 2009. In the real world, should this candidate win, the scenario could play out that the very first intelligence briefing he receives on Inauguration Day would find his advisers explaining that while removing the troops that quickly may be popular, it would be as foolhardy and disastrous as the hasty invasion that put the troops there in the first place.
A wise man once said that political candidates campaign in poetry, and if they win, they govern in prose. I love that analogy. Politicians run for office spewing the old wind song, and if they win, the song of wind is replaced by the stink of manure.
There are campaign promises, and then there’s the real world.
A presidential candidate runs for office, promising to cut spending. In the real world, it’s easy to abstractly say you’re going to cut spending, but it’s quite another to have to wield the scissors, as it were. What programs are you going to cut? Are you going to cut military spending? (Show me a candidate that’s willing to propose a cut in military spending, and I’ll show you a politician that’s either dumber than a box of pine cones or a politician that doesn’t really want to get elected.) The electorate can be a bit dicey in regard to spending cuts. If they’re benefiting from a government program, that money is put to good use, but if they’re not benefiting, it’s considered waste. Or look at it this way. While it’s politically cool to vilify the Pentagon for spending $200 for a screw driver, it could very well be there’s a reason that screw driver cost that much, and unfortunately, we’d find out why it cost that much if we cut the money that pays for that screw driver, only to find military vehicles stranded in mid-battle because the money that would have gone to buy the special screw driver that was needed to properly maintain the vehicle was arbitrarily cut because the short-sighted president thought it was wasteful. Your political opponents wouldn’t take advantage of a thing like that, would they?
There are political promises, and then there’s the real world.
It’s cool for the Democrats to prattle on endlessly about making certain that everyone has access to health care insurance. But in the real world, how are you going to provide insurance for 40 million people? And if the government pays for those 40 million people, won’t the other 260 million say, “Hey, we have to pay for our health care insurance, and they get theirs for free? That’s not right.”
Even if you could formulate a program, the implementation would be catastrophic. If you doubt this, ask any senior citizen about Medicare Plan D, and that’s just for prescription meds. Imagine what a mess it would be for the government to try to handle full health care decisions.
Yes indeed, there are political promises, and then there’s the real world, and (oftentimes,) nary the twain shall meet.
