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Comment by mtowle | Hacker News Reader

You would presume that now, yes. Nobody who was presuming that when he said it, however, made much of an effort to speak up.

Sort of like how "everybody knows" it was Congress's fault campaign promises X, Y, and Z didn't pass, yet at the time, nobody stopped to ask how much these promises can mean if the position he's campaigning for isn't capable of fulfilling them in the first place. "I presume by 'guarantee' he meant he'd try his best, since obviously the POTUS can't even introduce laws anyway. And as a former Constitutional law prof., I'm sure Obama knows that." Oh, super. Thanks.

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Well, yes, that's basically the converse of the Principle of Charity (let's call it here the Principle of Political Doublespeak): in est, when a politician makes a promise, what they're actually promising is to temper all the decisions which they themselves are presented with or hold sway over through that promise. For example, a promise to make the sky blue is really a promise on what color to paint the exteriors of all outgoing NASA satellite missions.

The only reason this is allowed is that everyone involved in the promise--the speaker and the lobbyists and the corporate executives and the military generals and the foreign policy analysts, and congress and the senate, too[1]--all share an understanding that all promises requiring certain attitudes from other parties the executive must work with--at least within a non-dictatorship--are empty, so no one is actually confused as to whether they will be fulfilled (they won't.) Thus, the stances behind them become a means of signalling, showing that one stands for the views of one's base even if one can do practically nothing "within the system" to advance the proposed agenda.

[1] Note that "the voters" aren't part of this list. This is one of the effects of truly representative democracy: there is no incentive for political language to be informative to anyone who doesn't have a say in "how the sausage is made."

"Nobody who was presuming that when he said it"

That problem lies with the voters, and the candidates are not going to change their behavior until the voters own up to their responsibilities.

Voters prefer to be told these little white lies about great intentions, rather than be bothered to apply basic knowledge of our federal gov't that should have been gained in junior high school. Voters whine and complain that it is the politicians fault, but voters' own behavior reward that which they claim to dislike.

I don't disagree, but at the same time, by the nature of the system, people aren't capable of behaving in a way that rewards what they like. "Vote-signals," if you will, are as noisy as human communication is capable of being.

That's trivially false; human communication can be literally 100% noise with nothing conveyed. This isn't that case.

In public policy circles, it is understood that the reason that controversies even exist is always because the issue involves trade offs between competing important values. (Those issues that do not involve difficult tradeoffs are sooner or later resolved, and then forgotten because the solution is acceptable as the status quo.)

IMHO people are trying to hard too get what they "like", too often looking for a simple magic bullet, when they should be in a conversation with their elected officials about what tradeoffs are reasonable in light of our values. We should elect people who ask us to be uncomfortable at times, but for well-thought out reasons.

Our politicians are acting highly rationally, in the context of the incentives the voters offer. "Voting the bums out" is not going to change anything, until the voters opt to build a better kind of electorate. The first step is diagnosing the actual problem, rather simply believing that the problem is always Team Them.

Public policy circles can (and will) think whatever they find soothing. The rest of us continue to roll our eyes inwardly, just as one does when listening to Tolkein fans debate whether the Eagles should've merely flown the Fellowship to Mt. Doom. (I say this not as a beltway outsider but as a man who grew up 7 miles from Langley, went to the Pentagon for TYKTW Day, and who lives and works in the area to this day.)

I get what you're saying. Politics is a choice between the unpalatable and the disastrous. Duh. Of course the Eagles should just fly them there.

What Tolkein geeks and policy wonks alike force themselves to ignore in order to have these mine vs. yours logicality debates to begin with is that the premise of their debate is a fantasy world. "If we want blank, we should vote blank" tacitly assumes that voting blank and persuading others to vote blank can sway the outcome of an election. Any thinking individual can see immediately that this is untrue.

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