[ispolin]

I suspect that you are right about this being innocuous. What I think makes this a "hot" story is not the intentionality, but that it reminds us how divorced campaign promises are from the actions a president takes in office.

gets on soap-box

Maybe the candidates aren't even lying outright. Maybe it's like when I'm estimating programming effort: I can really really believe in the estimate I give, but unless I look at how long similar projects took me or others in the past, the planning fallacy[1] gets me every. single. time. A similar thing for candidates would probably be to look at how much actual change previous presidents were able to bring about and assume that those presidents were just as smart and trying just as hard.

Of course even with a realistic estimate, there is another problem I constantly run into, and I imagine candidates do as well: Once you have a realistic estimate of what you can do, how do you compete with someone who over-promises?

One thing I found with programming is that clients who were previously burned by over-promising are somewhat inoculated against it. This doesn't seem to be the case for elections though. Does anybody have any other ideas?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy