There are at least three problems with politics as it is practiced today in the race to be the next U.S. president.

One: Candidates promise the world, but know they cannot deliver and have no intention of doing so in the first place.

Call this duplicity and dishonesty.

Two: Candidates promise the world, but don’t know enough about the realities of getting things done in Washington, D.C. to deliver on promises.

Call this duplicity and ignorance (including Donald Trump’s ignorance that appears intentional and Hillary Clinton’s ignorance that appears contrived).

Three: Candidates pander to the latest public concern even when they know – or should know — that their proposals have no relationship to solving real problems.

Call this duplicity and cynicism.

On this point, consider two of Donald Trump’s proposals. As Holman Jenkins writes in today’s Wall Street Journal, “A trade war with China will not bring back low-skilled, high-wage manufacturing jobs. On the contrary, Chinese workers themselves are being turfed out of their own factories by automation. Building a wall at the southern border won’t hold back cultural changes in America from the fact that Hispanics are a fast-growing economic and cultural bloc. At the risk of putting ideas in his head, Donald Trump would have to increase the white birthrate and even then probably wouldn’t change the emergence of an unfamiliar yet familiarly dynamic new America.”

In an interview on David Feherty’s program this week – yes, Feherty, the golfer, golf commentator and interviewer who has a quick wit and a solid technique for asking good questions – former president George W. Bush saidhe still holds hope for America.

What the country needs, he said, is for citizens of goodwill and good intent to rise, both as candidates for office and as those who vote. He added that democracy, be definition, is often swarthy and unclean, but some form of reason usually prevails.

One hopes Bush is right this time around.

We need candidates for the nation’s highest office who will tell the truth on the campaign and make only promises they intend to work hard to keep, including in the complexity of achieving anything in a democracy.

At the moment, my belief is that neither front-runner, Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, passes this test. So, I say a pox on both houses.

I intend to vote – some would say throw away my vote – for someone who stands on principle and pledges to lead this country with passion and integrity…someone who will say what he or she means and will do what he or she says.

What it will take to put this country on the right track is smart leaders and smart followers.