Keller @ Large: A 'Tell Me What I Want To Hear' Election

BOSTON (CBS) - Here we go, less than a week until Iowans "vote," if that's the right word for what they do there on caucus night, and two weeks until the New Hampshire primary.

And while we've gotten a pretty good look by now at what the candidates are all about, we're about to get our first serious inkling of what the voters this year are really made of.

For instance, we're told that voters are angry and skeptical, sick of political spin and promises that aren't kept.

And yet there at the top of the polls are Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, two candidates who've made a habit of offering what the Boston Globe describes as "pie-in-the-sky" policies, like Trump's Mexico-funded border wall and Sanders' promise of completely free health care.

Hillary Clinton is widely mistrusted, the polls tell us, even though she repeatedly injects pragmatic warnings about the limits of government power into her remarks. The same cynicism seems to apply to the other conventional politicians in the race.

And woe be unto anyone who tries to call out Trump for his distortions and falsehoods, even though the nonpartisan fact-checkers at Politifact found close to 80 percent of the Trump claims they checked turned out to be false.

We voters have more information at our fingertips than ever before, but are we too lazy to use it, or even care?

This wouldn't be the first time many of us have voted for people based on a gut feeling, because they scratched our itch in some way.

Perhaps this is a "tell me what I want to hear" election where candidates who care about at least some factual basis for their promises are wasting their time.

You know the old saying: "Every nation gets the government it deserves."