The Winning Ways of Our Lying Pols
Richard Cohen’s column in which he goes from lap dog to attack dog, The Ugly McCain, is sweeping through the blogosphere. A snippet:
McCain has turned ugly. His dishonesty would be unacceptable in any politician, but McCain has always set his own bar higher than most. He has contempt for most of his colleagues for that very reason: They lie. He tells the truth. He internalizes the code of the McCains — his grandfather, his father: both admirals of the shining sea. He serves his country differently, that’s all — but just as honorably. No more, though.
I am one of the journalists accused over the years of being in the tank for McCain. Guilty. Those doing the accusing usually attributed my feelings to McCain being accessible. This is the journalist-as-puppy school of thought: Give us a treat, and we will leap into a politician’s lap.
Not so. What impressed me most about McCain was the effect he had on his audiences, particularly young people. When he talked about service to a cause greater than oneself, he struck a chord. He expressed his message in words, but he packaged it in the McCain story — that man, beaten to a pulp, who chose honor over freedom. This had nothing to do with access. It had to do with integrity.
McCain has soiled all that.
I am reminded of a column from Slate’s Farhad Manjoo last week in which he wondered, Why isn’t Obama stretching the truth more often? Manjoo counted up the lies of McCain and Obama and concluded McCain was a bigger liar than Obama by a margin of 22 to 12. Manjoo’s conclusion?
[I]t wouldn’t be surprising if McCain’s lies worked. In my book True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society, published earlier this year, I argued that in the digital world, facts are a stock of faltering value. The phenomenon that scholars call “media fragmentation”—the disintegration of the mass media into the many niches of the Web, cable news, and talk radio—lets us consume news that we like and avoid news that we don’t, leading people to perceive reality in a way that conforms to their long-held beliefs. Not everyone agrees with me that our new infosphere will open the floodgates to fiction, but it’s clear that the McCain camp is benefiting from some of the forces I described.
Manjoo wants Obama to beat McCain at his own game:
Obama has inherent, obvious disadvantages in pushing a message in which “little facts don’t really matter.” For one thing, he’s boxed in by his oft-repeated search for a different kind of politics. But given the tenor of the campaign, Obama’s audience might be happy to see him take the low road. [...]
The misstatements of 2004 suggest a category of lies that Obama could get away with—ones that the public is already primed to believe about McCain. McCain’s signature policy goal is cutting out earmarks. But as the Washington Monthly‘s Steve Benen points out, in promising to veto all earmarks, McCain has inadvertently called for cutting some popular programs—including all U.S. assistance to Israel, which is technically provided through a kind of earmark. Of course McCain doesn’t really want to stop giving aid to Israel; an ad that suggested McCain’s cost-cutting zeal would lead to abandoning Israel would be as dishonest as McCain’s sex-ed ad. But it might also be effective, reinforcing the idea that McCain wants to cut too much.
Or what about that 100-years war? Picture an Obama ad showing McCain saying that the war in Iraq will last 100—or even 1,000!—years. The ad patches in footage of McCain singing “bomb Iran” and describing all the devastating effects of war. Actually, that ad exists—a comedy group posted it on YouTube in February. Nearly 2 million people have watched it. It’s hilarious, effective, and a complete lie. Obama’s advisers should be pushing him to approve that message.
I have long understood that our facility to believe whatever we want to believe is fostered and supported by the new media technologies at our disposal. I’m not at all sure I agree with Manjoo’s prescription for righting what ails us.
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6 Responses to “The Winning Ways of Our Lying Pols”
. Lott noted that his home state of Mississippi had voted for Thurmond when he ran for president on a segregationist ticket in 1948. Lott then added, “And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either.” Lott was clearly kidding too. But the furor over those remarks led to Lott’s resignation as the Republican leader in the Senate
And Joe Biden Said:Delaware, he noted, was a “slave state that fought beside the North. That’s only because we couldn’t figure out how to get to the South. There were a couple of states in the way.”
Why didnt Biden resign? Why no uproar?
Military service record: At the height of the Vietnam war in 1968, Biden was prime for the draft at 26 years old but was rejected for “medical reasons“.
Hmmm sounds like George W. Bush. Why no uproar?
Biden supported the Bush Administration post 9/11and voted in favor of the Iraq invasion. Flip-flopping. Our favorite campaign hyphenation.
Hmm. Those people who voted for the war have no judgment. Why no uproar?
I know lets just beat on Sarah Palin.
The facts are pretty clear that McCain had to go negative to win votes. The truth just doesnt seem to matter to anyone anymore unless its being used against you.
Manjoo is dead wrong when it comes to encouraging the Obama camp to start lying. It won't work for them. Any lie Obama tells or approves that gets caught becomes twice the scandal it would be for a normal pol – he gets hit once for telling a lie and a second time for claiming to be a new sort of politician while playing by old rules. Besides, McCain's stack of lies is starting to wear him down. Obama let him run out all that rope – avoiding the press, issuing attack ads full of lies, and letting the media vet Palin – and now McCain is hanging his campaign with it. The press is turning against him, probably out of frustration since he won't actually talk to them anymore. It seems like every day brings a new Palin scandal and the best defense they can come up with is that it's sexist to ask her questions about her record. McCain and his surrogates are getting reamed out by TV anchors over the various lies he's told both on the stump and in his ads. Between his appearance on The View and Tucker Bounds' appearances on CNN and FOX News, you can tell that the media is not inclined to sit back and let McCain lie his way into the White House. Obama doesn't have to do anything other than present the issues and what he plans to do about them because McCain is busy sinking his own ship.
Shhh. The media have decided already — discussion of Biden's liabilities are VERBOTEN.
Obama gets no credit for cheap exploitation and fluff. He gets credit for seizing the economy as an issue, only earning credit because his campaign has blundered so much lately and this is a welcome rare exercise of good judgment (admittedly not requiring an IQ above room temperature to realize the issue should be seized).
DLS says: Shhh. The media have decided already — discussion of Biden's liabilities
The post isn't about Biden, it's about McCain becoming what he used to despise.
Steve Chapman at Reason also calls out McCain in a similar article.
http://www.reason.com/news/show/128781.html
greenschemes- If Biden was just reciting a historical fact — why would it cause an uproar? Maryland (my state) was also a slave state that was forced to side with the union because of its proximity to the nation's capital. There — another historical fact.
And many voted for the Iraq War because of twisted , forged and cherry-picked intel. After they discovered the lies that were told and saw the war being mismanaged– they realized they'd been had.