Pete Hamill notes that since the passing of Barry Goldwater, plain speaking has disappeared from the American political scene. I agree. I’m looking for someone to vote for who’s really willing to say what he means and mean what he says. I’m not so sure I wouldn’t vote for someone I had serious disagreements with, if only he or she would be upfront about what they believed and why.

If I have confidence in your reasoning ability, I can have confidence that you might actually listen and learn, grow and change, and come around to my positions (or I may come around to yours, if you can state your position and defend it well enough). But when you hem, haw, weasel, and hide like candidates today do, I have no confidence at all in your leadership abilities.

A correspondent tries to affirm that George W does exactly that. In a word, no. A comparison of what he said before being elected in 2000 and what he has done after being elected reveals that.

Like Hamill, I didn’t agree with Goldwater, but I felt I could trust him. I wondered if I could trust Dean as well, once I realized that he wasn’t the candidate that Trippi was making him appear to be. I was still wondering when he withdrew. Candidate “handlers” do the candidate a disservice when they try to protect him like they do, because they prevent us from seeing who the candidate really is. True, we may not like who the candidate really is, but then again we may. But even more we don’t like being lied to; it creates an “anyone but you” backlash that could sink your future.