Thread: Why is "flip-flopping" a bad thing?

Well, everybody knows how to vote for the ideal candidate, unfortunately that really doesn't exist. So at the end it's a representative democracy at work - the candidate with most support wins and then gets some time to do things that may be unpopular.

The question that is interesting to me is - does this system improve in the long term? But what is 'long term'? After all there's only roughly 200 years that this thing has been running - do you think overall it's getting better, or it's getting worse? Of course there is much idealization of the past, but if you try to look objectively at the political system, does it seem to be evolving in a positive direction or in a negative?

As far as flip-flopping goes, to me this seems to be the result of where the political system is right now. Like it or not negative campaigning is more powerful - just look at all these political threads and 'two evils' posts. It's much easier for us to be negative, but I don't think any of us has a magic recipe that would solve all the problems. I can look at a problem and all proposed solutions and say 'I don't like this' and 'I don't like this either', but at the end of the day I have to pick something.

So with this in mind the politicians are often in the position of choosing to either put a negative spin on whatever their opponent is doing, or their chances of winning are getting rather low. McCain of all people knows how this works and he would rather be the victmizer than the victim.

I would really like if people would be thinking critically except of just blindly buying whatever soundbites their favorite media serves them. Unfortunately from all I've seen that is not going to happen and the politicians who can raise most money will get elected. All I'm saying is that the politicians don't actually spin things in one way or another because they want to - they do it because it is necessary to get elected.