I've been waiting for an opportunity to blog on a few political verities. Here are three from people of differing political stripes. What unites all three is that they are accurate, needed, and exceedingly applicable to the current domestic political scene.
On occasion, Joe Klein of Time magazine dredges up some interesting quotes that you have to be more than Gen-Y or Gen-X to be familiar with. His latest Time article, a discussion about the difficulties of real deficit cutting, included a very astute statement by William Bennett about how to assess presidential candidates.
Yeah, I know. Bennett is a right wing politician of the sort I distrust (if it matters to you, there are left wing politicians I also distrust). But I learned many centuries ago to take truth wherever you can get it. And this is TRUTH, so I recommend the Bennett Test for your voting toolkit.
If a candidate tells you only things you want to hear, if he asks nothing of you, then give him nothing in return, certainly not your vote, because he is not telling you the truth.
This was Bennett's recommendation as he introduced a parade of his party's presidential candidates in the mid 1990s.
Mentioning right wing and left wing politicians also reminds me of another truth, exceedingly significant in today's tough financial and social context. Arianna Huffington has been pushing this button on a number of occasions, including the interview at the announcement of the merger between Yahoo and the Huffington Post. She complained, accurately, that,
the use of the political terms “left,” “right” or “left-wing” is preventing policymakers from solving “problems” because of the connotation tied to each of them.
I'll tie this up with another accurate statement--that of David Brooks.
Society is too transparent. Since Watergate, we have tried to make government as open as possible. But as William Galston of the Brookings Institution jokes, government should sometimes be shrouded for the same reason that middle-aged people should be clothed. This isn’t Galston’s point, but I’d observe that the more government has become transparent, the less people are inclined to trust it.
Closed door political, off-the-record meetings have their place.
What ties all of these together is their political honesty. Take truth where ever you can get it.
