This just in...

[Crackpot]

You mean Vernie hasn't been stoking and exploiting anti GMO hysteria? Glad to hear it I thought he was...

[MajGenl.Meade]

So you admit that the Republicans pander to hatred and whip up fear and the Democrats do not.
Therefore there is no equivalence.
yrs,
rubato

Pandering means "pandering" no matter what you might say, rubato.

Pandering is the act of expressing one's views in accordance with the likes of a group to which one is attempting to appeal. The term is most notably associated with politics. In pandering, the views one is expressing are merely for the purpose of drawing support up to and including votes and do not necessarily reflect one's personal values

Dems want black votes - ergo, they pander to their perception of what blacks want to hear.
Dems want poor people's votes - ergo, they pander etc.

Pandering is not restricted to any one person or party

I don't give a rat's ass about your opinions on "equivalence" which is neither here nor there

[Fafhrd]

"Pandering" seems to be a negative term. Damned if I want to look it up to see how it works. If the people who might vote for one are predisposed to like a certain set of positions, is coming out in favor of those positions pandering if one is also philosophically disposed to those selfsame positions?

[MajGenl.Meade]

It rather depends, Fafhrd. Stridently rabbiting on about more blacks being in prison because the judicial system is rigged against them (i.e. white people like to jail black people) - when you know full well that blacks proportionally commit far more crimes (against their own people, let me point out), is pandering.

I think that a careful analysis into the root causes of crime (poverty, poor education) is more useful because solutions are to be found in addressing er.... poverty and education.

When it's made to appear that blacks are only gunned down by white police officers - when it's a fact that blacks shoot blacks a zillion times more often than cops do - that's pandering.

When "gun show loopholes" are closed because maniacs with legally obtained guns perpetrate horrible crimes - that's pandering. And when the parents of children killed by legally obtained guns are wheeled out to sob how important it is to close gun show loopholes, that's just sickening.

Yelling loudly that "Amerikerrrr" needs free college, free health care, free jobs at a thousand dollars an hour, free time off (about a year or perhaps more) for husbands, wives and homosexuals alike on full pay with a guaranteed job, free lunch, free automobiles, free housing and free everything - that's not pandering. It's merely stupid because Bernie believes it. I may have exaggerated.

[Fafhrd]

Pandering seems to be merely a matter of one's own philosophical positions. If one disagrees with a politician, then he's seen as pandering.

I fail to see how Donald Trump believes in anything except getting richer and richer and richer, judging by how he's lived his life until now.

[MajGenl.Meade]

Oh dear. One doesn't have to disagree to recognize when a politician (or a good friend) is pandering. If Hillary or Bernie had wanted to speak about economic opportunity (lack of) and education (lack of) as the driver of black incarceration, I'd have no problem. Instead they simple chose to mouth "hate whitey" rhetoric clothed like a black sheep.

Donald Trump panders like crazy - he may as well be colored black and white and given a plastic barrel to play on. In fact, I'm not sure anything he says is not pandering.

[Long Run]

Pandering is telling people what they want to hear, without regard to whether it is total B.S. or has any chance of success or has no tradeoffs. R candidates telling an electorate they will repeal the ACA is pandering (at least until there is a new POTUS). Telling voters that there will be free college for everyone is pandering by Sanders. Meade has given plenty of other good examples. Most politicians of all stripes have engaged in the practice to one extent or another, but some would call the current situation a pandermic.

[oldr_n_wsr]

I define "pandering" as one telling the people what they want to hear regardless of the one who's doing the talkings point of view. If their view aligns with those he's talking to, fine, if not, that's fine too.

Telling them what they want to hear.

ETA
Damn, Beat me too it.
Well I am notchanging what I wrote, that might be considered pandering.

[Econoline]

... some would call the current situation a pandermic.

Excellent!

[Sue U]

... some would call the current situation a pandermic.

It's pandermonium.

[liberty]

I wonder what Victor Herman would have thought about communist thugs?

Victor Herman (September 25, 1915 - March 25, 1985) was a Jewish-American who spent 18 years as a Soviet prisoner in the Gulags of Siberia.[1][2][3] He briefly held the world record in 1934 for the highest parachute jump and became known as the 'Lindbergh of Russia'. He was one of thousands of Americans sympathetic towards Communism who went to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s to work but who met tragic fates during the Stalin purges.[4]
His memoir of his experiences, Coming Out of the Ice (1979), became the basis for a 1982 CBS-TV movie starring John Savage and country-singer Willie Nelson.[5][6]
Biography[edit]
Herman was born in Detroit where his father, a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine,[3] was active in organizing unions at Ford Motor Company. After Henry Ford made a deal with the Soviets, 300 Ford workers and their families from Detroit who held Communist sympathies were sent to Russia to help build a new Ford factory in Gorky.[7] Victor Herman's family were among them.
In 1931 when Herman was 16, he moved with his family to Russia for a 3-year work shift, while retaining US citizenship. However in 1934, the Great Purge began and many American expatriates were disappearing, or were arrested and deported. During these years Herman focused on his prodigious athletic talents and was noticed and recruited by the Soviet Air Force who taught him how to parachute. He was competitive and strove to be number one. On September 6, 1934 he achieved international notice after he set the World Record for the highest parachute jump, from 24,000 feet.[8] He became known as the 'Lindbergh of Russia'.[4]
Soviet authorities asked Herman to sign the World Record documents which included a blank space for citizenship which Herman filled in as "U.S.A." After continually refusing to change it to the U.S.S.R., he was arrested in 1938 for "counter-revolutionary activities" and spent a year in a local prison that included brutal tortures: he had to sit on a bench 18 hours a day unmoving and nonspeaking facing a door, he was beaten in his kidneys every night for 52-days straight, he was thrown into a cell with violent criminals who tried to kill him, the diet was starvation, among other things. Most of his fellow call-mates died during this period from similar deprivations. Herman believed his youth and strength saved him.
Herman was then sentenced to 10-years hard labor in a Siberian gulag where he suffered extreme hardships including beatings, starvation, torture, freezing, extreme labor. He survived through various means, for example eating rats which lived on the frozen corpses littering the camp. He was briefly released from the Gulag system in 1948, but was required to stay in Siberia as an exile as part of his parole agreement. He broke his parole however when he married a local Russian woman, Galina, who then had a baby girl, Svetlana. He was re-interned, but this time his wife and child were allowed to live with him under less severe conditions.[9] The death of Stalin in 1953 brought improved conditions for Gulag inmates.
In 1956, Soviet authorities claimed they had no file on Victor Herman, as if he had never been a prisoner, and he was free to leave Siberia but not Russia. Herman spent the next 20 years moving with his family to various locations in the USSR taking odd jobs as a boxing instructor, English-language teacher and farmer on a collective. Through it all he never gave up hope of returning to the United States. In 1976, after nearly a decade of filing applications with Soviet authorities who refused to recognize his American citizenship, he was allowed to return to the US. Galina, his 2 girls and his mother-in-law soon followed him.
Herman's mother died in Russia in the early 1930s, his father died there in the 1950s and his brother Leo died in Russia in 1974 after committing suicide. His sister remained in Russia for the rest of her life, she married a Russian and had a career researching pathologies. In 1978, Herman filed a $10 million lawsuit against Ford Motor Co. for the hardships he suffered, but the suit was unresolved at the time of his death.[9] The memoir of the experiences, Coming Out of the Ice (1979) was ghostwritten by Gordon Lish.[10] The book later became a TV movie in 1982 starring John Savage, Willie Nelson and Ben Cross.[5]