The honesty-deficit and elections

In a college class on mass communication, I read about the 60/40 principle, which stuck with me. It goes something like this: Republicans and Democrats always debate about the effectiveness of welfare. Democrats support it while Republicans oppose it. To defend their positions, Democrats traditionally use a statistic that showed approximately 60% of all welfare recipients were off of welfare within a year. This is intended to prove that the average welfare recipient is not living on welfare forever. Republicans use a similar statistic that showed approximately 40% of all welfare recipients go off of welfare only to return within three years. This is intended to prove that welfare is abused. Like every other discussion, they aren’t arguing about the same thing: the Democrat is talking about the average person and the Republican is eager to pick out the exception to the rule. What it does highlight, however, is the honesty-deficit inherent in the discussion. Both parties attempt to paint a picture that benefits them. But this often leads to outright deception and obvious falsehoods.

You would have to go back to the late 1970s before you can find a president with real integrity. Pres. Jimmy Carter is known for his honesty and “plain-speaking” (before that became a euphemism for bad grammar) and the victim of this honesty-deficit. Modern political scientists suggest that he would have been a better president if he had lied to us, instead of telling us the truth.

Carter’s successors are all known almost as much for their fabrications as they are for any successes: Reagan (trickle-down economics, Iran/Contra), Bush I (“read my lips: no new taxes”), Clinton (“I did not have sexual relations with that woman”), and Bush II (you know the list) all suffered and benefited from an honesty-deficit.

So here we are today: living with a standard that suggests that not only is lying a given, but it is acceptable. Not only is lying a better option than telling the truth, it is considered a mistake if you tell the truth. Yes, Clinton may not have been impeached if he hadn’t lied, but Bush did lie about much more significant matters and he remained in office.

That is why I find this election season so intriguing. Then Gov. George Bush got away with all sort of lies in the 2000 election because the media was enraptured with him and had it in for Vice President Al Gore (check out this Rolling Stone article). In 2004, we allowed lies to circulate because we decided that it wasn’t our job to disprove them, it was the candidate’s; so Sen. John Kerry fell victim to the blatant lies of the Swiftboat ads. This time, Sen. John McCain is using the same advisors (Karl Rove disciples) including Rove himself (while pretending to be an independent journalist for Fox) to run the most negative campaign in recent memory against Sen. Barack Obama. What is interesting about this is that Obama doesn’t seem to be “fast and loose” with the truth, he seems to be assessing the situation and describing it accurately. McCain, on the other hand, seems to be in an all-out lie mode. He puts out cheap, misleading, and downright lying ads and then pretends like he doesn’t know about them in public appearances. He makes cheap, misleading and downright lying statements in speeches all across the country and then pretends like he doesn’t know about it during the debates. During the debate, he tries to score political points with calculated deceptions, such as the tax-increase bogeyman, despite unanimous third-party agreement that Obama won’t raise taxes on the middle class. McCain even knows he’s lying.

This seems to create a certain level of cognitive dissonance: when one is accustomed to “small” lying from candidates and minor deceptions, we aren’t usually that trusting of our candidates, but we want to afford them some credence as experts. But what do we make of debates in which one is a truth-teller and the other is a liar? How do we deal with that? What seems surprising to me is that Gov. Sarah Palin seemed even more adept than McCain at lying in public. Her debate positions were truly indefensible and show an entire lack of credibility.

The question remains: what do we do with this honesty-deficit, and more, this honesty gap? How does a conversation with someone continue when they claim that 2+2=5? How does the media cover such a campaign as that? And how does the voter judge the suitability of a candidate when honesty is not ensured? For the sake of the country, shouldn’t we do more than call McCain on his lies, but instead demand honesty? Shouldn’t he be disqualified from consideration?