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All politicians in meaningfully contested races are liars. When they tell the truth it is only because they have calculated that, in that particular instance, the truth is more effective than a lie, or that a lie would be found out and be more damaging in the long run.
Some politicians enjoy lying – as Harry Truman said of Nixon, “He can lie out of both sides of his mouth at the same time, and if he ever caught himself telling the truth, he'd lie just to keep his hand in."
Most politicians, however, enter politics because they think of themselves as good people who want to do some good in the world. They would prefer to be honest, to the degree the system allows. The habitually honest ones either lose straight off or gain minor offices in homogeneous districts. The better a politician is at avoiding candor, the further he can rise. The top national politicians are all accomplished and habitual liars.
Electoral politics is inveterately hostile to candor. A group cannot have a coherent world-view, yet a politician must convince a majority-sized group of individual voters that that he agrees with them as individuals.
So, to grease the wheels of democracy, we have constructed an ethical fantasy that deception is not lying. We reserve the term “lying” for intentional flatly false statements, and even then we prefer not to use the L word lest the whole system collapse. (Most US Senators have never once in their lives said an opponent was “lying.”)
But I am calling bullshit on that. The measure of a lie is how it deceives, not its verbal structure. Spin, misdirection, omission, willful vagueness and “image” are all forms of lying.
The modern Republican Party has pioneered a sociopathic style where bald-faced lying is admired because such divorce from reality is a testament to one’s devotion to irrational but emotionally satisfying ideology. Nixon, Reagan, Bush 41 and Gingrich are all fine examples, and no American public figure has ever lied the way G. W. Bush does. He is a stupid man and his only education in politics was that lying works. Their media supporters (Fox, Limbaugh, The Washington Times, The American Spectator, et al) are as luridly dishonest as the Daily Worker was during the Nazi-USSR non-aggression pact. We can even handicap a Republican field by looking at how pathologically dishonest the players are. (That’s why Romney bears watching.)
No Democrat today approaches the shear madness of the modern Republican style, but make no mistake… all successful politicians of any stripe are accomplished deceivers. FDR, JFK, RFK, Carter, Clinton and Gore were all accomplished deceivers. (Okay, Gore wasn’t very good at it, which is why he has since diagnosed himself as temperamentally unfit for presidential politics.)
Every Democrat running today is a liar in direct proportion to how serious they are about winning. The more people you must appeal to the more devious you must become because the average voter you are reaching for is increasingly vague figure.
Senator Clinton is a famous liar. (I assume no examples are needed to support that!) Obama’s chosen form of dishonesty is omission, being all things to all people. The higher Obama reaches the less candid he must be. (Oppose the war when you’re a nobody, but fund the war when you become a Senator thinking about running for president.) Edwards is an amazing phony… makes Bill Clinton look like Sir Thomas Moore. (A tie-wearing manager “works in a mill” but that’s hardly what the phrase is supposed to imply.)
Those three candidates are not going to be very candid because they have some chance of winning. As you move down the list the honesty increases. Dodd can say some sharp things at 2%… what does he have to lose? Kuccinich can take the “tough” stances because he is not a serious candidate. Gravel can be as candid as he wants to be because nobody cares what he says.
It is dangerous to look for honesty in a candidate for two reasons. 1) Your heart will be broken eventually, and 2) the best liars are almost always more electable, and more able to successfully pursue an agenda if elected. (I was a Tsongas guy in 1992, but it was easy to see Clinton was going to win it all and be a decent president, because he has the gift of shameless frame-and-spin.)
I think our modern cynicism makes us more mature voters. It is hard to imagine Jimmy Carter running today on the platform “I’ll never lie to you.” Most people would just laugh. And Carter’s presidency was severely hampered by unrealistic expectations of virtue and clarity that he himself had created. On the other hand, nobody gave a shit about Bill Clinton’s impeachment because he was not elected to be honest in the first place. He was elected to DO A GOOD JOB.
Not only is there is little positive correlation between honesty and being a good president, there may well be a negative correlation. This is obscured only by the fact that only really bad presidents get called liars by history. The successful presidents are considered crafty or shrewd. (FDR misled America into involvement in WWII well before Pearl Harbor, under-mining the constitution in the process. Congress was fiercely isolationist, so FDR used all sorts of executive prerogatives to fight an unauthorized war on the side of Britain against Germany. Had WWII turned out badly for us we would never hear the end of it.)
If you value honesty above all things, support Mike Gravel and hope he never reaches 3% in the polls.
PS: The Internet is full of lies because people have anonymity. I don’t get that. Lying on the internet is insane… Our anonymity on the Internet should allow us the rare opportunity to be utterly honest. (Something to think about)
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