Obambi strikes back in Bush's ugly clothing

The presidential campaign in the United States has been going on for nearly a year as the party out of office has struggled to find its candidate.

The winnowing process of 13 potential starters has been all but officially over for the past three months.

Republicans will anoint Mitt Romney at their convention this month, but he and President Barack Obama have been going at it at least since April.

Romney would like to make this race a referendum on the economy and his tea-leaf readers say that with 8.2 per cent unemployment the incumbent President will lose.

Never mind that presidents, by themselves, have little power to affect unemployment. Forget also, as many Republicans would like voters to do, that Obama inherited a collapsing economy that threatened to bring down the rest of the world's economies with it.

Obama, for his part, has decided to take over the playbook of Karl Rove in 2004. George W Bush ran for re-election then, running away from the hyped intelligence and burgeoning military disaster that Iraq was becoming. Instead, Rove advised the Bush team to focus on the character and style of his opponent, John Kerry, and make the race a choice between the muscular, unflinching pose that Bush liked to strike and the flip-flopper, effete wind-surfer with a French-speaking wife, as Kerry could be portrayed.

The idea is to drive up the negative impressions of the opponent before he can define himself to the voters.

The goal is not so much to attract votes to the side of the candidate who's carrying this approach but to repel from voting those who might, by inclination, support the opponent candidate.

It's a tough and ugly style of campaigning, one in which issues are neglected in favour of personal attacks. And this year both sides are pursuing it.

When Obama first took office, Maureen Dowd, the tough liberal columnist for the NY Times, irritated with his over-compromising ways, called him Obambi. On the right, Sarah Palin openly scorned his campaign slogan as Republicans stymied his legislative programme: "How's that hopey changey going for you?"

Now the supporters of Romney have broadcast ads saying, "Where is that hope and change?" But this time, Obama has responded with attack ads portraying Romney as a pirate corporate raider with offshore bank accounts.

The loss to the democratic process from this style of campaigning is that neither side is willing to address the serious issues that need attention.

There's little chance of real discussion about how to deal with climate change, or civil rights versus security, or unemployment, for that matter. Instead, attack ads are full of distortion and, in Romney's case, outright deception.

I've spent my life trying to understand human behaviour, and among the puzzles still unresolved for me is the blatant way politicians, whether in the US or here, fail the simple truth test repeatedly.

Candidate John Key promised not to raise GST. Elected Prime Minister Key did so with alacrity. The puzzling thing is that politicians lie without evidence of any shame. And shame is an important constituent of conscience.

It turns out there may be an explanation of sorts: the Dunbar number. British anthropologist Robin Dunbar plotted neocortical development - the brain's area of behaviour control - against group size. His hypothesis is that 150 is the limit beyond which members of a group lose the capacity for stable interpersonal relationships.

In other words, we tend to be more honest when everybody knows everybody and their business. In a group bigger than 150 members, anonymity allows for adventurism and shameless self-invention.

It's not certain that people who enjoy the pursuit of power through politics are more dishonest than others, but playing fast and loose with facts and truth is more easy when the group they're trying to influence, the mass of voters, is just that - a mass.

That's why it's up to all of us to try and keep them drawing within the lines.