Why do politicians lie?
I don’t think it’s so much that politicians lie as that the best liars tend to become politicians. I’m not saying politicians are liars. I think, as ptrask pointed out, that many, if not most of them have grand ideas about what they will accomplish once they get into office, only to find that they have to make many compromises once they get there in order to get anything accomplished at all. But I saw a really interesting program about twenty years ago about a study done on the possible connection between the abiltiy to lie convincingly and the ability to lead groups. Random groups of people of differing personalities were chosen for the study. Each was put into a situation where they had to taste a really terrible tasting product and then look into the camera and say how great it tasted. Most had difficulty being convincing, but some were absolutey dead pan. After the taste test, they were all broken into groups to perform some task but they made sure that there was only one dead pan
