Have you ever sat through a very long political speech and realized at the end of it that nothing of any real substance was said the entire time?  This is what professional politicians have been trained to do.  They have been trained to sound good without every really getting very specific about anything.  I am running for Congress in Idaho's first congressional district, and I could be just like the other professional politicians if I wanted to be, because I know all of their tricks.  But I would never do that, because I believe that we need to get rid of the corrupt career politicians that are absolutely ruining this country.

The people that run political campaigns all across America are constantly trying to get their candidates to be as vague as possible.  The reason why this is done is so that the candidates will offend as few potential voters as possible.  So if you go to most candidate websites, you will find a lot of flowery language but very few specific policy proposals.  Instead, you will read lots of fluff about "improving education" and "fixing the healthcare system", but if the political people have done their job correctly there will be very little in there that could possibly upset someone.

In the end, they want to make you feel good about the candidate, and they want you to be won over by the candidate's personality.

Of course if you are able to pull a candidate aside and talk with him privately, it will be a completely different story entirely.  In a private conversation, a candidate will spend the first few moments trying to figure out what you want to hear, and then the rest of the conversation will be spent telling you exactly that.  Perhaps you have even experienced this at some point.  The professional politician will go to great lengths to convince you that he knows exactly where you are coming from, that he feels the same way that you do, and that he wants to do something about your particular issue.  It is the same conversation that he has had with a thousand other people, and of course the professional politician never actually intends to follow through on any of those conversations.

And once the professional politician gets into office, he conveniently forgets all of those promises that he privately made.  He knows that a few people will get upset, but he also knows that 99 percent of the population will not keep track of what he does after he is elected.

Buzzwords are another key tool that professional politicians like to use.  For example, Idaho is one of the most "conservative" states in the country, and so every politician up here uses that label to attract voters.  One member of the state legislature that won ten elections in a row would always portray herself as a "conservative" during election season, but the truth is that she was actually extremely liberal.  Year after year she has had a voting record that is worse than many of the Democrats in the state legislature, but she kept getting away with it because she knew how to be a professional politician.  Fortunately she is retiring from politics now, but she made an entire career out of conning the voters.