Mazzagloia: Flattery and bad politics

"Don't criticize, condemn, or complain." This was a principle technique presented Dale Carnegie's best-selling self-improvement book "How To Win Friends and Influence People." Carnegie recommended that you should "Give people a feeling of importance."

All of that is shorthand. Flattering people works as long as it doesn't seem too phony. If it's just a little phony, though, people will still fall for it.

"Together we can" is just that kind of slogan. It's positive and forward-looking. It's also flattering because it implies a sense of trust in the common wisdom. The hidden message is, "wouldn't you prefer a government that appreciates your wisdom and intelligence?"

"Yes we can." Is another one of those rhetorical roads to nowhere that delivers the same message.

In Massachusetts, candidate Deval Patrick promised to add 1,000 officers to hard-pressed police departments all across the state. He also pledged to lower property taxes.

Now, it wasn't that he didn't understand fiscal realities. In fact, even before the election he told the voters that the Commonwealth had a $1 billion dollar deficit.

Of course, 1,000 new police officers never became a reality. To make things worse for the cops, underpaid police in smaller communities took another hit when this governor led the move to lift away some detail work. Last week, Patrick gutted Quinn Bill funds which provided financial incentives for criminal justice studies. Meanwhile, of course, the burning question is how much we can expect the sales tax to increase.

"Yes we can!" said presidential candidate Barack Obama as he pledged that every American with a job who made less than $250,000 a year would receive an income tax cut. That's grimly humorous now after billions of so-called stimulus money has failed to help 14 million Americans now out of work. Obama's Imperial Presidency has taken a bad fiscal and monetary situation and made it far worse.

Let's face it, flattery works. Some day, it would be interesting if some enterprising student counted how many times candidates flattered their audiences and how those correlated with political success. The depressing thing is that the flattery almost never fails to get applause.

There is a relationship between flattery, time, and reality. People generally want government to succeed. Nevertheless, disenchantment is spreading fast both within this very blue Commonwealth and at the national level.

At the state level, the frustration with the governor is so calcified that even stalwart Democrats are reluctant to defend him.

Nationally, people willing to give the president more time are now fearful that this only gives a runaway administration more opportunity to change the country into something it does not want to be.

Fortunately, the next election is close enough for people to make some necessary adjustments. Nationally, one of the best things for Obama would be an increase in the number of Republicans in Congress who could moderate extreme positions. That is almost a certainty.

On the state level, it's more difficult to predict . The Republican state party remains unresponsive to any signs of life.. However, there is a rising sense of conservative thinking among Democrats. They know that change is needed and that people are growing increasingly impatient.

Dale Carnegie's 1937 book was an instant success. Over 15 million copies were sold and it is still popular. Still, the task is different now. It's more than finding out what people don't want and pandering to change for the sake of change. Now, it's a matter of supporting what people really need.

Independence Day celebrates freedom. It honors a people and a government that stands by innovation and prosperity based on a competitive spirit. It never envisaged government participation in the private sector along with steady setbacks on the fondest dreams of the middle class.

The next election will place a lot less emphasis on slogans and flattery. People will demand more focus on real problems and clear solutions. And that's a good thing!

Frank Mazzaglia can be reached at fmazzaglia@aol.com.