How Much Substance Do You Really Expect From Candidates

The recent complaint about Obama is that his speeches have little substance--or as Hillary lamented the other day, "Where's the beef."

But seriously, how much substance do you really expect from the candidates?

I think we have a right to expect the candidates (1) to address in an intelligent and clear way the great issues of the day, (2) to show they have adequate knowledge of all the principal and nearly all of the tertiary public policy issues, (3) to communicate their basic philosophy on the role of government in our society, and (4) to discuss why they believe they can effectively make government do those things they most badly want government to do--that is, their style of governance.

I do not expect a definite prescription for every conceivable problem that exists (though I do want to know that they are aware of the problem and the options for government).

The most worthless information communicated by the candidates is the long position paper answers with 18 points on most issues. The devil may be in the details, but in real life, lots and lots of people are going to have input drafting and negotiating and shaping and finally determining the details.

And events can quickly change the perception of issues. In the 2000 presidential campaign, George Bush and Condi Rice were critical of our efforts in Bosnia and the use of American military forces to police another country. What we didn't learn in the 2000 presidential campaign is that with foreign policy George Bush really didn't have a strong view on how actively America should intervene abroad and and how George Bush planned to govern as president.

And it is not entirely correct that presidential candidates campaign in poetry but govern in prose. Without the poetry, Lincoln and even FDR would have had far less success.