Political pandering is telling a voter what they want to hear in
order to solicit their vote. It is a
timeless political technique. However,
when it is done irresponsibly, without any limits, pandering directly destroys
purpose.
The Teachings of Law School
It is no accident that
many politicians are trained as lawyers.
At the very beginning of my law school experience I was taught an
essential principle about legal argument, whether oral or in writing. In drafting an argument we were taught
that opposing briefs were to be like "two ships passing in the
night." For a long time I was
confused as to what this meant. I mean,
if two people are writing about the same set of events, shouldn't there be some
agreement, some overlap in their positions?
The answer to this question, according to the quote is, "No."
The two positions should be presented as so diametrically opposed that you
would not easily recognize them as the same event, hence, "ships passing
in the night."
This method, called argument or persuasion, seeks to present
the client's position in the best possible light. Accordingly, Squires and
Rombauer, the authors of our legal writing text informed the reader that:
"The facts must be candidly set forth, but the writer may
arrange them, phrase them, and expand or condense treatment of particular
events so as to emphasize favorable facts and to diminish unfa  vorable
facts."
So the art of persuasion depends on skillfully emphasizing
what we call the "favorable facts" and diminishing what we refer to as the
"unfavorable facts."
Now any reader of intelligence will soon realize that this
kind of factual manipulation comes very close to the border of downright
factual distortion. Some people call
factual distortion "lying."
But, as you can see from the explanation, lying is not what lawyers are
taught. They are taught to manage the
facts. That this process brings one
continually into the danger land of distortion is taught as merely one of the
hazards of the practice of advocacy or persuasion.
And these days, because of the prominence that lawyers have
in our public life, even non-lawyers engage in this sometimes hazardous
activity.
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