The same procedure as every election, James!

Now they have finished their first debate on TV ... Schröder vs. Merkel. What a fight! Boring, annoying, manipulative. And afterwards representatives of different parties indicated that (of course) the person they supported had won the debate. Ooops?!?! How come?!?!
Considering myself as an average voter it always strikes me, if explanations are miles away on meta or metameta levels and do not seem to have much connection to what was actually said. Fortunately this is commonly the case when people try to summarize an outcome they do not like at all. It's like with the annual figures about aids spreading over the world. Since we all know that the number of infected people is not decreasing we get away by looking at the increase of the number of new infections. The total number of infected people is still rapdily increasing, but - hey! - the increase decreased by 1%. Praise the lord! Vote for the CSU! CDU! Green Party! FDP! ...

Who cares about all experts telling us that the current price for oil is rather a matter of speculation and companies sucking our blood - and NOT a real shortage of oil! Politicians still try to get votes by promising to free some of the oil reserves - like shortsighted firefighters that confuse a water tank with an oil tank and afterwards claim that they at least did try to do something. Indeed! Just the wrong thing, because while thinking about what the other parties would say, they lost time for developing a good solution.

Yes, I have to admit, it's all about magic. And a colorful lie sells much better than the truth in black & white. If the world economy is going down, we claim that our politics was OK, but the economy was just too bad. If economy gets well and things look fine, we claim that it's all our success. If we do not know what to do, we claim that we need economical growth and promise we will create it (without telling anybody HOW) and postpone everything to an undefined point in the future! In other words: we could as well walk into the next casino with our countries' money and play roulette, but we declare that we have "a system" to generate growth.

If it does not work like that, we can still blame it on world economy or (even better) of the unwillingness of the society to support our reforms (usually the George Bush principle: Take from the poor and give to the companies.) Too bad that reality sometimes crosses our paths and we have to be strong, close our eyes and stumble forward.