My mistake was to use the word "all", LEJ. There are some honest salsemen in this world, yes...certainly...I've met plenty of them on an individual basis. But what you mostly see in mass media advertising and political advertising, which is what I was referring to, is gross exaggeration of the "product", pandering to people's most primitive instincts and weaknesses, deliberately attempting to mislead the customer into buying something that's actually no good for him at all (like soft drinks and junk food, for example), pandering to emotion and abandonment of logic....by every deceitful means possible the advertiser attempts to get the public momentarily excited in such a way that they will buy the product.

And a candidate is such a product.

I was NOT referrring to every single individual salesman in the world, so I should not have said "all sales".

I trust you get my meaning now?

It is the political parties who are sales organizations at election time, and they sell their various candidates to the public. The party that runs the better sales campaign (and is in a better position to do so at the time) makes the sale. Their guy gets elected.

The best possible position for either party to be in is for the other party to have been in power for long enough to have deeply alienated a majority of the public....at that time the pubic is ready to "kick the rascals out"....and take a chance on the other set of rascals! ;-)

And the game goes on. The most dangerous thing a man can do for his credibility is usually to get elected, because the system that he is figurehead of does NOT serve the general public. He will inevitably disappoint people. The lies, exaggerations, and false propaganda that were used to sell him to the public will be seen to be hollow and empty as his term goes on...and many former supporters will abandon him.

It happened to Bush. It's now happening to Obama. It happens to virtually all of them, because they are elected by false advertising and that means that they will disappoint people severely once they are in office.

This is also the case in Canada, the UK, and probably just about everywhere else on the face of the Earth right now...so don't think the USA stands alone in my indictment of the current political order. Hardly.