> If your perfect candidate in every other respect also planned to take away the right to vote from Native Americans, could you vote for her? Of course not.
If there's no reasonable way they could push that pet issue of theirs through (because the rest of Congress would just call them an idiot) then sure, why not?
It's sort of like the think/say distinction ("you can't get in trouble for thinking"), but taken another few notches further: politicans shouldn't really be judged for what they say they'll do, or even what they appear to attempt to do knowing they'll fail—only what they're likely to actually use power granted to them to accomplish.
Most candidates, once in power, are effectively centrists. With presidential candidates, there's the moderating influence of Congress and the Judicial system; but even with individual Congressmen or Senators, once they attain their positions, they're sitting atop a hierarchy of (technocratic) policy advisors that tend to—when all advising in the same direction—override the boss's personal preferences. If all your employees, all your lobbyists, and all the think-tanks say to do X, you're going to do X, even if you (and your "base") would rather do Y. (Which is why we call the thing the President heads the Executive branch: the President isn't much setting policy, they're effectively just executing policy decisions arising from the entirety of the D.C. strategic intelligence community.)
Thus, most candidate positions are postures: things said to signal allegiance to certain voting bases, in full knowledge of the fact that those promises will never (be allowed to) come to pass. Posturing is PR: a big machine which gets set aside when the election is over. And thus, posturing should be ignored—given no weight—when trying to predict the value of electing any given candidate. The candidate's posturing—their PR—has no predictive value on what they'll really accomplish when handed power.
If, on the other hand, you can look below the posturing, and figure out what each candidate will really do with power (which is much harder; it involves a lot of looking at who they have ties with and what promises or deals they've made to get power), then you can actually pick a candidate based on how you want the world to look in the future.
If there's no reasonable way they could push that pet issue of theirs through (because the rest of Congress would just call them an idiot) then sure, why not?
It's sort of like the think/say distinction ("you can't get in trouble for thinking"), but taken another few notches further: politicans shouldn't really be judged for what they say they'll do, or even what they appear to attempt to do knowing they'll fail—only what they're likely to actually use power granted to them to accomplish.
Most candidates, once in power, are effectively centrists. With presidential candidates, there's the moderating influence of Congress and the Judicial system; but even with individual Congressmen or Senators, once they attain their positions, they're sitting atop a hierarchy of (technocratic) policy advisors that tend to—when all advising in the same direction—override the boss's personal preferences. If all your employees, all your lobbyists, and all the think-tanks say to do X, you're going to do X, even if you (and your "base") would rather do Y. (Which is why we call the thing the President heads the Executive branch: the President isn't much setting policy, they're effectively just executing policy decisions arising from the entirety of the D.C. strategic intelligence community.)
Thus, most candidate positions are postures: things said to signal allegiance to certain voting bases, in full knowledge of the fact that those promises will never (be allowed to) come to pass. Posturing is PR: a big machine which gets set aside when the election is over. And thus, posturing should be ignored—given no weight—when trying to predict the value of electing any given candidate. The candidate's posturing—their PR—has no predictive value on what they'll really accomplish when handed power.
If, on the other hand, you can look below the posturing, and figure out what each candidate will really do with power (which is much harder; it involves a lot of looking at who they have ties with and what promises or deals they've made to get power), then you can actually pick a candidate based on how you want the world to look in the future.