Professional communicators control elections

But he lamented the capacity of a candidate to make promises on the basis of truth; the promises will never be able to be truthfully redeemed at some point in the future given that they’re contingent upon contestable criteria and unknown future circumstances.

In other words, when circumstances change after the election - say for example the elected government discovers it has fewer dollars in the bank - then the pre-election promises dissolve like sandcastles in the rain.

In the New Public - the space where Mayhew places us in the early 21st century - undifferentiated rhetoric is so widespread that symbolic information and vague assertions have completely replaced discursive contests.

Discursive contests, or open forums, have been replaced by symbolic representation.

Undifferentiated rhetoric - the mass of information that comes to us from all sources that say how “unique” a particular brand or individual candidate is - fills all the available spaces, including microblogs such as Twitter, so that we have no clear view of the future or what we might expect from our elected representatives beyond tomorrow.

Mayhew’s argument is built upon the idea that professional communicators dominate public communication and public opinion, displacing the free public of the enlightenment with a new public subject to systematic persuasion and influence.

This is a public sphere in which the prospect of stakeholder citizens (voters and taxpayers for example) being able to make a connection between themselves and policy, is almost zero.

On each day of the present election campaign candidates, when asked direct questions by the news media, weave and dodge like they’re in the ring with Danny Green.

Which is probably why there is truth in a recent Tweet suggesting that the TV drama character Doc Martin be elected prime minister because we would, at the very least, know where we stand with him.

Mayhew concluded that we need serious rhetorical forums not given over to commerce in rhetorical tokens.

He argued that it is standard practice to advocate a positive position for an issue without specifying exactly how promised benefits from that position will materialise.

Witness health, education and primary industry as examples in the present campaign.