After he had been president for two years, John F. Kennedy sat down in his Oval Office rocking chair one December day and answered questions on all three of the big TV networks for more than an hour.

It was 1962, a time before every image and word from the White House was packaged by professional con men, and Kennedy was a president with the poise, depth and ease to comfortably handle a wide-ranging, unscripted conversation in public. He was also midway between campaigns, and so could afford to speak with more candor than usual. He was asked to describe how the job had measured up to his expectations, and he answered in part:

“The problems are more difficult than I had imagined they were. … It is much easier to make the speeches than it is to finally make the judgments.”

Tuesday, we concluded what has seemed like the longest presidential campaign in history. It slogged on through sound-bite clashes on cable TV, e-mail campaigns and Web site wars, as Barack Obama, John McCain and their running mates and minions vied daily and sometimes hourly to mischaracterize each other, to brand each other with misleading adjectives and to offer broad caricatures of each other’s positions – all of it reported and dissected with ponderous gravity by competing teams of partisan analysts and anchors.

Most of this foolishness will evaporate once the votes are cast, like hot air from a punctured balloon. In 1960, it was the fictional “missile gap” with the Soviet Union that Kennedy’s handlers conjured to help him falsely portray his opponents as indolent and smug – the United States enjoyed, then as now, an overwhelming advantage in missiles, warheads and technology.

The charges today are equally dubious. Few sensible voters believe Obama is a Marxist or someone who “pals around” with terrorists, just as few believe McCain is really erratic, confused or in lock-step with President Bush. Neither Obama nor McCain is personally responsible for the current world economic crisis, and neither has anything more than a well-reasoned guess about what government can do to get us out of it.

Lowest-common-denominator rhetoric rarely squares with reality, and at best requires artful interpretation. Take, for just one example, Iran, a thorny problem for the United States in the Middle East. It is a bellicose, evangelical Muslim theocracy seemingly bent on building its own nuclear arsenal, with little regard for international law or, for that matter, civilized behavior. Obama has been characterized as wanting to capitulate in advance to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, while McCain has been branded with an ill-considered ditty on the old Beach Boys hit “Barbara Ann” – he jokingly substituted the words, “Bomb, bomb, bomb/ Bomb, bomb Iran.”

Silly as they are, these extremes became part of the debate this year; typically, neither bears much resemblance to reality.

Even if a President Obama were inclined to negotiate with Iran without preconditions, which he will not, with whom would he talk? Iran’s government has a hydralike quality, with few clear lines of authority beyond the guiding hand of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who generally avoids anything beyond sweeping platitudes. It has a fake democracy that allows only approved candidates to campaign and must submit all legislation and decisions for religious review. For every formal chain of command, there is a shadowy informal cabal of clerics. Jimmy Carter wandered in this maze in 1980, trying to get back our kidnapped embassy staff, only to watch his presidency slide down the drain.

Iran has set some preconditions of its own, if the country’s vice president for media affairs, Mehdi Kalhor, is to be believed. Kalhor says that before his country will negotiate, all U.S. forces must leave the Middle East, and we must cease all support for Israel.

Bombing Iran is an equally unlikely option. The nation’s nuclear-development effort is widely dispersed and redundant by careful design, so the idea of knocking it out with a pinpoint bombing run is fantasy. An attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would have to be on a large scale and sustained; even then, it probably would only delay the inevitable. If Iran is determined to build a bomb, it will.

Bombing would unite the country firmly and urgently behind the effort, solidify hard-line mullah rule for at least another generation, and invite terrorist counterstrikes throughout the Middle East and probably in the United States, at a time when we already are trying to fight two expensive wars.

This is just one issue. Nearly every problem that lands on the White House desk is like this. Ideology and rhetoric don’t define the space in which a president can maneuver – facts do. There are no easy, obvious choices. Every decision has a downside and comes with not just a political cost, but a human one.

When Kennedy said, “There is no experience that can possibly prepare you adequately for the presidency,” I think that’s what he meant.

– Mark Bowden is a former staff writer at The Philadelphia Inquirer and is now national correspondent for the Atlantic. His e-mail address is mbowden@phillynews.com.