Krugman: Dishonest campaign, dishonest administration

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9/13/2008 05:40:03 PM PDT

{snip}

Dishonesty is nothing new in politics. I spent much of 2000 - my first year at The New York Times - trying to alert readers to the blatant dishonesty of the Bush campaign's claims about taxes, spending and Social Security.

But I can't think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign's lies in 2000 were artful - you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again.

{snip}

Why do the McCain people think they can get away with this stuff? Well, they're probably counting on the common practice in the news media of being "balanced" at all costs. You know how it goes: If a politician says that black is white, the news report doesn't say that he's wrong, it reports that "some Democrats say" that he's wrong. Or a grotesque lie from one side is paired with a trivial misstatement from the other, conveying the impression that both sides are equally dirty.

They're probably also counting on the prevalence of horse-race reporting, so that instead of the story being "McCain campaign lies," it becomes "Obama on defensive in face of attacks."

Still, how upset should we be about the McCain campaign's lies? I mean, politics ain't beanbag, and all that . . .


read more: http://www.sgvtribune.com/opinions/ci_10457292

[DeepBlueC]

1. this was the part I liked

...

I’m talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.

And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?

What it says, I’d argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.

Paul Krugman

[Beartracks]

2. We need more Krugmans.

"Well, they're probably counting on the common practice in the news media of being 'balanced' at all costs. You know how it goes: If a politician says that black is white, the news report doesn't say that he's wrong, it reports that "some Democrats say" that he's wrong. Or a grotesque lie from one side is paired with a trivial misstatement from the other, conveying the impression that both sides are equally dirty."

Best short explanation of this "phenomenon" I've read. Silly media.

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3. That underscores the value of news journalists

. . . like Olbermann and Maddow