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Front Page » Archive » Vol
2 No 56 » here
Promises, promises
It's good to see politicians change their minds. So why
do we vilify them for doing it, and damn them for not?
by Karin Litzcke
The Republic
I am quite enjoying the reign of Mayor Flip-Flop and his
crew here in Vancouver.
I liked it when Mayor Larry Campbell changed his mind about
the Woodward's injunction mere days after campaigning against
it. I appreciate his firm new stance in favour of the Olympics.
And I am pleased to hear that Jim Green has found the indemnity
clause in the Olympic agreement to his satisfaction. I may
not agree with their positions, but I still like what they're
doing.
I appreciate these changes of outlook because to me, they
are evidence of something I like to see politicians do: consciously,
thoughtfully, making decisions.
Considering that holders of political office are expected
to do a lot of decision-making during their terms of office,
it is surprising how little attention is paid during election
campaigns to candidates' abilities to do decision-making
well.
It is, after all, what we hire them to do on our behalf,
since--the sincere good intentions of plebiscites and public
hearings notwithstanding--we don't all have time to investigate
every lane-paving application ourselves.
Candidates usually campaign on the basis of their finished
decisions about current and past issues, which are, by definition,
made on the basis of incomplete information, made without
the benefit of hindsight, and made without any burden of
accountability to the citizenry.
If the incumbent government is not popular, it takes little
more than spouting a bunch of misinformed and dated opinions
to win an election. And then you can be facing the extremely
uncomfortable process of changing your mind, which hurts
a lot at the best of times, in public.
Candidates can spout any damn nonsense they want on the
campaign trail, and they usually do. What is usually piled
on particularly thickly is ideology, the art of the foregone
conclusion.
But you can't govern on the basis of forgone conclusions
about events that haven't happened yet, about decisions that
are not yet even on the horizon. What becomes important the
moment a candidate assumes office is how they will collect
information and make decisions when they are fully responsible
for their impacts, and when they don't have the misguided
opinions of their hated predecessors to place themselves
opposite.
Unfortunately, voters have been distracted from evaluating
candidates on how well they make decisions. Now we evaluate
them on the basis of their promises, which are basically
bad and dated and irresponsible decisions. Then, we evaluate
them in office on the basis of whether or not they stick
to their "promises."
Politicians who really take their governance responsibility
seriously are therefore stuck between a rock and a hard place.
They can implement their previously-formulated bad decisions,
or they can process the new information they receive in office
and implement better ones. It is precisely this conundrum
that has put Larry Campbell in the idiotic position of holding
an Olympic plebiscite that he now knows he can't pay any
attention to.
The benefit of sticking to your previous position is that
you are lauded for having campaigned honestly, for sticking
to your guns, no matter how ignorant or how wrong your position
is. As long as the decision doesn't have any disastrous consequences,
you can have a pretty good ride on your campaign promises.
Some people might consider the waste of $500,000 or so on
a plebiscite a disastrous consequence, though.
The plebiscite is the perfect illustration that, sometimes,
changing your mind and making a new, better decision is the
better course. Yet what happens to the wise and responsible
politician who does this? Why, he or she is slammed by media
pundits for not sticking to his or her promises.
The media thus punishes politicians for making good decisions
in office.
In truth, it isn't the breaking of the promises that is
the problem. It is the making of the darn things in the first
place. The campaign trail would be a better place for the
media to do its slamming around promises.
Rather than slamming politicians in office for changing
their campaign positions, the media should slam candidates
during campaigns for making promises at all. Candidates on
the trail should discuss their decision-making record in
their previous endeavours, and they should be pressed to
do a thorough analysis of current events, not simply make
pronouncements about them.
If candidates had the integrity to refrain from making promises,
and the media had the integrity to stop making the changing
of one's mind a political scandal, maybe the electorate could
be weaned off its unhealthy and media-instilled obsession
with promises too.
I think that most of the citizens of Vancouver, presented
with a clear set of reasons why a meaningful Olympic plebiscite
cannot really be held, would let it go. Too bad Larry can't.
Front Page » Archive » Vol
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