by Jeffrey Schaffer

Created on: October 26, 2009   Last Updated: October 29, 2009

Politicians lie because the truth is complicated. Part of the great difficulty of being in political office is that the job is split between creating a public image and the intimate wheeling and dealing necessary to get things done. What most people see a lie, a politician sees as trying to sum up a complex problem into a ten minute sound byte.

While most people can agree on what the country should strive for: a good economy, national security and working public utilities, the question about how to accomplish these things is bewildering. In a country of three hundred million people, fifty states, thousands of cities and towns, innumerable ethnic and cultural lines and a political spectrum that runs from socialism to libertarianism, everybody has different ideas about what to do and everybody thinks that their idea is the best one.

The art of politics is the art of compromise and relationships. A good politician is someone who can forge personal relationships with a broad spectrum of people and who knows what can realistically be accomplished and what has to be put off for later. Where lying comes in is when on the campaign trail or in media stories, a politician must form a positive public image to be reelected so his projects can move forward.

In these cases, it is necessary to summarize the issues into catchphrases in order to create support. Trying to spend hours going over banking regulation, Federal Reserve reports and Tax law can be quite mind-numbing. Instead it is easier to say: "I'll create new jobs", or "we'll save the middle class", or "we'll create new spending programs".

There is also a matter of perception to take into account. If a person gives money to a politician who supports a cause that person supports, he'd call that lobbying, but if someone else gave money to a cause the person didn't agree with, he'd call that bribery. In essence, we tend to consider politicians honest when they do things that appease the things we are interested in and call them liars when they don't.

If a politicians does something that benefits the people he represents, then it makes the people happy and they will reelect him. However, to someone outside of his constituency, it would be considered "pork-barrel" legislation that is wasteful and corrupt. A politician has to choose between doing what is good for the people he represents and what is good for the state or country as a whole. He must create the impression that he'll do both even though they can often times be mutually exclusive goals. Thus we get the lying and sloganing.

In essence politicans lie because we want them too. When elections are being held, we want them to make us feel better and know that by electing them everything will turn out well. What we don't want to hear is the details of the legistlation and the compromised necessary to get things done. A significant part of leadership is creating confidence and sustaining morale. Generally our economy and society function well when we are optomistic and patriotic, and poorly when we are pessimistic and selfish.

Therefore, politicians will keep lying to us until we learn these things, and start to expect them to tell us the truth no matter how hard or difficult it is. When they can trust that we can handle the truth is when we will get it.

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