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Finally, President John Dramani Mahama decided to offer himself for public scrutiny on the increasingly unavoidable platform of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), which seeks more to assess the intellectual capabilities of presidential hopefuls, rather than their personal charisma and their party puff. Now, at least, Ghanaians have a unique opportunity to assess all the aspiring presidents as they pitch the public on how they intend to deliver on mindboggling promises within given national resource constraints. Just as other key aspirants have already been compelled, on this particular platform, to put figures to their grandiose plans, Mahama will have to do same. Will that however change the wild promises syndrome plaguing the country now, where little men (women) with big egos play God and promise Ghanaians anything and everything? The Fourth Republican constitution designed the Ghanaian presidency for super heroes. Those who vie for that position must therefore promise the electorate unrealistic deliverables and swear by themselves that they will deliver. The larger population prefers that to truthful calculations about the capacity of the national economy and the power of the president to make good his (her) promises; thus any candidate who emphasizes the actual truth in his campaign cannot expect to be elected. Ghanaian presidents will therefore always disappoint, since they are forced to bite more than they can chew�and try to chew it, anyway. But, of course, that will always be after the fact. That situation, in itself, is not necessarily counterproductive. It places tremendous pressure on the president to focus on performing above himself to deliver on campaign promises, if he should stand a chance of being re-elected for a second term, or for his party to be retained in power after his maximum two, four-year terms. However, the gap between the promises and the realities is what would condemn any pretentious president to a single term. Ghana, under the current dispensation, has not had a one-term president but a simple analysis of electorates� contributions to political discussions in the mass media, crowd-sourced sentiments, and electoral statistics over the past two decades showed Ghana could have come to that in the December elections; but for the demise of incumbent president John Evans Atta Mills, which seems to have changed the dynamics quite significantly. President Mahama now has an opportunity to close that gap with his sensible, but worryingly belated, decision to be on the IEA platform. Indeed, it seems to be against this backdrop of bridging the credibility gap that all the major political parties have lunged into serious campaigning towards the December elections. And it is against the same only, that an early assessment of their chances becomes meaningful. Of the severely fragmented �Nkrumahist� group, Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom�s Progressive People�s Party (PPP) seems the best organised, as well as the one offering fresh ideas. Nduom�s strategy of campaigning on �truth� introduces into the Ghanaian political milieu an undercurrent waiting to upsurge � and it has a strong appeal among some intellectuals � but that presently will not drag the masses into its swirl because that approach, in the Ghanaian sub consciousness, diminishes the superhero aura of the president and his ability to turn around their negative circumstances overnight. �Truth�, simply, has not much appeal with the masses, now. This may only be an early move by Nduom, which may change along the way, even though obviously time is not his best ally now. If Nduom�s campaign message stays the same through to December, he�s getting nowhere. Invariably, the two leading parties, the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the New Patriotic Party (NPP), seem to have all the space to slug it out and produce the next president. True to expectations, the two heavy weights have already thrown hefty probing jabs that are as informative as they are intriguing. In order to dispel the air of grief and sense of loss that gripped the nation with the passing away of Mills, a mood that NDC�s John Dramani Mahama rode on fully, and is still clinging to with his posturing as a supremely tolerant person (and that is not necessarily false or far from the truth), the NPP organised a press conference urgently, after the appropriate funeral and burial period. The NPP, there, described Mahama and his newly chosen vice-president Paa Kwesi Bekoe Amissah-Arthur as no fresh wine in new skin, but the same old stock that soured the economy by superintending over the payment of mindboggling judgment debts and a rapidly depreciating cedi that makes nonsense of all macroeconomic gains registered in the immediate past. By that the NPP tried, and succeeded to some extent, to jolt Ghanaians from their stupor while also reviving their strategy of making the economy and corruption, the central themes of their attack against the ruling party while seeking to woo floating voters to their side, with a bait of free education to the secondary school level. The NDC has thrown a flurry of jabs of its own. President Mahama, utilizing his communications skills to the fullest pressed his advantage by embarking on a largely political tour, which he dubbed �thank you for your sympathy�, of all 10 regions of the country. Mahama simply pressed his advantage by capitalizing on sympathies for NDC from Mills� death by promising to commence all the projects promised by the latter but which were not broached over the past three and half years; never mind that he had, at the time of the promise, barely three months to accomplish that before the next elections. Expectedly, as the campaign intensified the two pugilists have, and continue to throw in hefty body shots. Nana Addo used the IEA presidential debate platform to work out the math of his free education promise, while he also tried hard to exorcise the ghost of arrogance with which his opponents have branded his psyche. It must have hurt the NDC somewhat, since they have used every available platform to seek to punch holes in Nana Addo�s IEA performance. Tellingly, the NDC�s counterpunch, a well-crafted and indeed intellectually brilliant policy statement shortly thereafter, did not really hurt much simply because it spent a good time saying so much but nothing really meaningful against Nana Addo�s free education agenda and in the end gave it much more prominence. The NDC policy statement was also too loaded with almost every developmental issue confronting the nation and that may have left majority of masses wondering what the real thrust of the message was. People simply want something to clutch onto; just like a piece of floating wood would be useful to a drowning man in stormy waters and not a load of planks in a ship sailing by, just meters away, that does not notice him. With the heavy punches landed so far, Nana Addo�s free education promise seems to have gained better traction with the people thus tipping the scales in his favour in these early rounds. John Mahama, the master communicator and ever-cunning politician that he is (consider how he�s managed to steer off all the destructive undercurrents within the NDC and national politics to emerge as one of the most affable politicians in the country) has managed to, once again, box his way out of a tight corner by his decision to be at the IEA presidential debate, obviously against his party�s position. It is to be seen whether he will keep his shots few, straight and simple thereby having a more telling effect�or whether he�ll still be carried away with promising the construction of markets, fishing ports, and schools in the middle of nowhere that obviously is not taking him anywhere.