Are we looking forward to potential governance by sophomoric platitudes rather than defensible policies? Superficially appealing declarations that “I want to be President of all Americans,” a pledge to mitigate troublesome inflation by imposing price controls, and assurance that substantially increased taxation will benefit the middle class reflect either duplicity or naïveté. The apparent expectation is that a gullible public and largely compliant press will accept this nonsensical jargon without asking the critical question, ‘how’? The devil is in the details. Nearly half of all Americans are unlikely to be enthusiastic about any rankly partisan proposal, a recipe for further Congressional dysfunctionality. Most of these glibly delivered shibboleths do not survive critical analysis of the breadth and depth of their impacts in a complexly interrelated economy. Price controls are multi-leveled and extraordinarily costly to monitor, as are experiments with tax policy and code that expand the bureaucracy. The superficial menu to date reflects both economic illiteracy and administrative impracticality. Intimidated citizens in a democratic republic risk becoming inadvertent subjects of a bureaucratic autocracy. Other proposals being floated involve subversion of several of our Constitutional amendments. It’s imperative that November 5 become a day for massive public expression of common-sense thinking about perpetuating American exceptionalism. Phil Osifer