“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

— Upton Sinclair

“It is possible to wake up someone, no matter how fast asleep he may be. But it is impossible to wake up someone pretending to sleep.”

— Old Tamil saying

Together, the quotes just about sum up the second presidential debate and, in a larger sense, the tragedy of our politics.

Asked to state three mistakes he had made, Bush hemmed and hawed, before giving a patently dishonest reply. And he had time to prepare — several months ago at his press conference in the White House, a reporter asked him the same question (to be fair, the reporter asked for just one mistake). Easy enough to bash Bush for his asinine response. Forget Iraq. He could easily have taken the opportunity to say, “Well, I take responsibility for everything that goes on in my watch. Obviously, 9-11 was a great failure, and the fact that none of us were aware of the magnitude of the threat does not make it any less of a burden for me”. Such an answer would not only have put Kerry’s Iraq tap dance centerstage, it would have also helped clear an atmosphere reeking of inanity.

As for his challenger, one is reminded of what happens to many of us when we try to balance our checkbook. Unable to make the figures match, we eventually resign ourselves to the existing discrepancy, and resolve to balance the numbers from here on out. No one believes his claptrap about ‘giving the president the authority’ and accusing him of using it. But, so much do so many people dislike Bush and his vapid struttings that they put away this fantastic explanation of Kerry’s (in a lockbox?) and rejoice that he has at last begun to speak out on Iraq.

There is, of course, the frightening prospect that the president does think he is right. Al Sharpton said exactly this in one of the primary debates. Let us hope he was lying, because the alternative is even scarier.

We have a president who believes nonsense (and speaks it fluently), and a contender who is intelligent but has trouble speaking the simple truth.

For example, why is Kerry, six months after he made the “I voted for the bill before I voted against it” statement, still unable to explain something which has a completely understandable and logical basis? A friend of mine gave an explanation in 30 seconds. “I wanted to support the 87 billion dollar appropriation, but I wanted it to come out of the tax breaks we were giving to the rich, not from outside the budget. In the first resolution, such a proposal was included — I supported it therefore. In the revised one, they took out this provision, and so I voted against it”. But no! “I was wrong the way I spoke about the war. The president was wrong the way he took us to war”, was Kerry’s explanation. God knows in which focus group this gem was hatched. It occurred to me that a simple test can be applied to Kerry — would you vote for a similar resolution today authorizing the use of force against Iran and North Korea? I suspect Bush too will be stymied by the same question.

The misstatements, obfuscations, half-truths, platitudes, diversions and the rest are now piled so high they might equal the twin towers in height. In the end, all we know is that there are two figures: one who took us to war on a lie (and still proud of it); and the other, who cannot bring himself to call this a lie (though embarrassed by it).

It is easy to blame Bush and berate Kerry, but it is important to ask why the candidates have to craft their image with such elaborate care, why they cannot even appear capable of mistakes. Do people really think their leaders are somehow rendered flawless by an election? If the leaders think so, then the neurosis of the leaders only reflects that of the population. The paradox is that the people would rather their leaders lied to them, because reality is inconvenient.

Do I want to be told that a cruise missile paid for with my tax dollars killed or crippled an Iraqi child who had absolutely nothing to do with Saddam Husain, Al Sadr, Al Qaeda, Zarqawi, or the Baathists? Or would I rather change the channel? Voting rights in a superpower carry tremendous responsibilities. In our own way, we are handing our next administration the power to unleash shock and awe. To say we gave them the power to use wisely is to behave as absurdly as John Kerry did in the matter of the Iraq War resolution. Knowing what we know now, we need to understand the tremendous responsibility in our hands. The consequences will long be with us.

[Niranjan Ramakrishnan is a writer living on the West Coast. His writings can be found on http://www.indogram.com/gramsabha/articles. His blog is at http://njn-blogogram.blogspot.com. He can be reached at [email protected].]

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