Civics is to Politics as Olympic Wrestling is to Professional Wresting

In Olympic wrestling, you actually try to win the contest, judged on an objective basis.  In civics, you actually want a good result for the body politic.

In professional wrestling, you want to be entertaining and get paid - everything else is unimportant.  Not just secondary, but almost irrelevant.  And in politics, the only contest is the election (like ratings on TV) and what happens after the election matters only if it affects the next election.

This is a real advantage for some politicians - they only care about winning.   They don't have to worry about getting any real results, or truth, or reality, or being objective about anything.  They don't have to worry about actually accomplishing anything, and they never want to be evaluated objectively.  They just want to have their promises be believable between the day they make them and the day that people decide how to vote.

So your job as a citizen is to try to figure out which politicians are using this approach. Then the decisions get even tougher - but we'll talk more about that later.