Wishful thinking clearly dies hard when it comes to the chronically bad behaviour of our political parties.

For despite their ongoing preoccupation with muckraking and mudslinging, there are still a few dreamers among us who genuinely expect better from our political players and their propagandists.

These idealists seem to think Bermuda’s politicians are capable of demonstrating the same high-principled seriousness of purpose as members of a debating club.

But the evidence would suggest this is as forlorn a hope as, say, believing scorpions can ever be tamed to the point where they might be safely displayed in petting zoos. While theoretically possible, the odds of it actually happening are stratospherically remote.

Still, it’s hard not to have a certain degree of sympathy with our more starry-eyed countrymen.

Bermuda has had to contend with an unprecedented number of vastly complex socio-economic issues in recent years. So it’s not entirely unreasonable to expect our political parties to even now be issuing steady streams of sober-minded position papers offering voters considered appraisals as to our best options moving forward.

The great questions of the day cannot, after all, be decided by platitudinous talking points or cretinous party political spin.

There’s certainly no shortage of stubbornly resistant problems our politicians should be addressing. An economy that is still having difficulty regaining traction seven years into a crippling downturn. Disturbingly high pockets of unemployment and underemployment and all of the associated social traumas which result from deprivation. A health system we can increasingly ill afford and a new hospital we are going to be hard pressed to pay for. And painful decisions on both the public sector’s size and generous benefits packages cannot, of course, be postponed indefinitely.

But too many of our politicians are content to indulge a flair for the melodramatic and the lurid rather than expend critical thought on consequential matters.

Frivolous issues — and, in some instances, complete non-issues — are seized on and invested with significance in directly inverse proportion to their real importance. Difficult matters which offer no easy solutions are rarely raised.

Calculation and contrivance rather than conviction continue to drive too many issues to the top of the public agenda. Sensationalism and the spurious short-term publicity value of manufactured crises and distractions routinely eclipse Bermuda’s long-term interests.

Most recently, of course, the planned public-private partnership to redevelop the airport has become a lightning rod for political controversy.

A number of strong arguments could be made against Government’s optimistic claims regarding the supposed economic benefits of proceeding with this massively scaled exercise in infrastructure development.

But the Opposition has yet to make a convincing case for rethinking the airport venture. Instead of reasoned arguments, the Opposition has depended on provocative — but ultimately unsubstantiated — allegations of “malfeasance” and impropriety.

Government, of course, responds by targeting the easily answered accusations of corruption and entirely ignoring the more germane but less hair-raising economic arguments which the Opposition has failed to raise.

And in this way genuine concerns surrounding the airport project — and even the very concept of objective truth — are lost amid the lengthening shadows of competing disinformation campaigns and the relentless clamour of the party noise machines.

Much the same applies to other key issues and policy areas as well. Bermuda’s politicians clearly prefer the free-for-all of constant campaigning to the complexities of policy-making.

Framing the choice facing voters at the next General Election in starkly apocalyptic (and cartoonishly simplistic) “us-and-them” terms, encouraging a climate of mutual suspicion and mistrust, overly reliant on obfuscation and misdirection, both of our parties are now on permanent election footing.

Every issue, or non-issue, which can provide even a temporary blip in the polls is being politicised and leveraged for possible electoral gain.

And, as is so often the case when a campaign is seeking momentum, even the most complex matters are being routinely reduced to crude generalisations. Pitched to the electorate in the type of exaggerated Caps-Lock hyperbole which is normally the preserve of the more excitable variety of blogger, there is no room for subtlety, nuance or detail in these ham-fisted attempts to engage voters’ interest.

This ceaseless campaigning is, of course, aimed at shoring up approval ratings among the faithful and converting all potential converts in the run up to the next General Election. Such opportunistic tactics might indeed be useful in galvanising support. But they do nothing to create the type of well-informed electorate which has rightly been described as the essential prerequisite of a democracy.

The only litmus-test of success for the parties will be the eventual electoral results. Actually delivering good governance, principled leadership and improved public services are very much secondary considerations in their strategising — assuming they factor into their thinking at all.

With elections now increasingly reduced to glorified popularity contests based on the most superficial and shallow stylistic concerns, no matter which party wins Bermudians, to some degree, always end up as the losers.

And no amount of wishful thinking can ever camouflage that dismal fact.