Do we prefer dishonest politicians?

I have just returned from a short visit to some of the (increasingly expensive) countries of the European Union. For much of the time I was in the enjoyable company of couples from the U.S. and had ample opportunity to overhear their conversations.

One such conversation between a wife who was a Democrat and her husband who was a Republican was brief and instantly amusing but as I pondered on it I was reminded that we need to be careful in wishing for what we want: we might get it.

The conversation ran thus:-

Wife. ‘The reason I like Obama is that he believes in what he says.'

Husband. ‘That is just what worries me.'

My first reaction was that the husband was simply reflecting a Republican view that Obama was both dangerous and seriously wrong in believing that the U.S. would be a more successful society if it embraced policies which were redistributive of wealth and ‘socialist'. I put ‘socialist' within quotation marks because, as another of my travelling companions explained to me, it is seen by many in the U.S. as a word connoting a political system based on the taking of money from those who work and giving it, in cash or kind  ( e.g. ‘excessive' access to education or health care), to those who don't  - ‘like in the U.K. and France'.

But on reflection I wondered if the husband also meant that, in an inherently selfish world, the interests of the U.S. would be served better by a leader who was more practised in the arts of deception and less inclined to honesty and openness.

Sadly, there is something dangerously enticing in this. Early in my business career a wise and very civilised mentor who had detected my tendency towards idealism said ‘Jackson, you must never forget - a gentlemens' agreement usually becomes an agreement to swindle the gentlemen.'

The snag is that if we prefer to be led by those prepared to lie on our behalf, we must not be surprised or aggrieved if, on occasion, those leaders decide it is better if truth is concealed from us and that we should be lied to too.

Michelle Obama once remarked ‘The trouble with politics in our country is that too many of our politicians see it as a game. And that is wrong.' The implicit disrespect in the attitude she was describing follows almost automatically from a situation in which a nation accepts that there are advantages in being led by those practised in deception even though it is their own nation that they deceive.