Elections are in the air again, not just in this country but in many others, including Britain, Canada, Turkey and, somewhat prematurely, the United States. We may think of these periods as times when voters debate and choose alternatives, but this is often not the case. Corruption, cynicism, censorship and intimidation routinely reaffirm the status quo and subvert the democratic process. In Sudan, for instance, the third most populous Arab nation, indicted war criminal Omar al-Bashir is seeking reelection from the country’s 38 million citizens. Voting has just been extended by one day following an unexpectedly low turnout, but the president’s main rivals have withdrawn because of “many irregularities in the voting process” and Bashir, who overthrew an elected government in 1989, looks set to sweep the vote again. (In 2000, his party won 86 percent of the vote; in 2010, after another boycott, it won 68 percent.)
Even within functioning democracies, voters are all too often misled into making uninformed, or deceptively emotional choices. In his recent memoir the political consultant David Axelrod recalls a tipping point in the 2008 campaign when Hillary Clinton decided to dress down the novice candidate nipping at her heels. Irritated by his talk of transformative post-partisan politics she scoffed at Obama’s “raising the false hopes of our country about what can be delivered.” To her embarrassment, however, Clinton was swiftly out-manoeuvred by Obama’s ability to make those hopes more appealing than her jaded realism. Later, Axelrod admits that “stubborn realities would intrude” on the Obama White House’s efforts to live up to these promises. And yet, despite a disappointing first term, Obama rekindled many of the same dreams when running against the seemingly heartless and plutocratic Mitt Romney. In both campaigns, although key issues were raised in lengthy debates and town hall meetings, Obama ultimately prevailed because he had been marketed as a more caring, optimistic and trustworthy brand.
Modern elections have come to resemble months-long infomercials rather than the public awareness campaigns they used to be. Many parties strive to reduce complex platforms to a handful of slogans and soundbites that solidify a candidate’s brand identity. Most of the time these are simply new versions of old talking points, but the right phrasing can make a huge difference. “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Ronald Reagan asked the American public in 1980. A modest question that proved to be a death blow for the oil-shock weary and stagflation-prone Democratic incumbents. Twelve years later the strategist James Carville distilled the essence of Bill Clinton’s message to just three words: “The economy, stupid!” The Obama slogan “Yes we can” took this tendency to its logical extreme; instead of addressing anything tangible, it offered a phrase that invited people to project their personal hopes onto the candidate. Surprisingly the words remain evocative despite the demise of so many of the original dreams during Obama’s time in office.
We like to think that we are not duped by rhetoric during election seasons, but most evidence suggests otherwise. Seasoned campaigners know that large, effusive statements can usually be walked back, with few consequences, after an election — as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent toing-and-froing on Palestinian statehood has shown. What tends to set developed democracies apart from their less-experienced counterparts is how well the independent media hold politicians to account. In the US, for example, the website Politifact keeps a tally of how often Republicans and the Democrats live up to campaign pledges. The results are instructive. The GOP Pledge-o-Meter estimates that the party currently keeps 38 percent of its promises, cuts deals on 30 percent, and reneges on the remaining 32 percent; Obama’s numbers are 45, 24 and 22 respectively – with one percent “stalled,” mostly due to GOP intransigence. If the “leader of the free world” can’t keep half of his promises, should we expect our politicians to do better?
Of course not all political rhetoric is merely self-serving. The Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano has a charming parable about the power of words to alter reality. Thieves burgle the house of a solitary old man and steal a chest that that he has hidden in his cellar. At first they are disappointed because instead of money the chest contains only love letters received during the old man’s younger years. Rather than burn the letters, the thieves decide to mail them back to him, one at a time, each week. To their surprise the letters fill the old man with joy and he can hardly wait for the postman to arrive with the next one. Galeano’s image of what literature can do to renew a society’s sense of itself can also be applied to politics. For at their best, politicians are like the good thieves who delve into our forgotten memories and recall us to our better selves. The real power of political speech, and ultimately democracy itself, is not that it can persuade us to elect people who break their promises more often than not, but that it can restore our sense of belonging to, and engaging with, our fellow citizens, and inspire us to build a better society.
