[Vision2020] The Real Loser: Truth

[Art Deco]

  [image: The New York Times] <http://www.nytimes.com/>

------------------------------
November 5, 2012
The Real Loser: Truth By KEVIN M. KRUSE

Princeton, N.J.

THE director Steven Spielberg, whose “Lincoln” biopic opens Friday,
recently said<http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/movies/lincoln-premiere-a-reminder-that-in-heat-of-campaign-political-films-walk-a-fine-line/2012/11/04/4e8d9194-2437-11e2-9313-3c7f59038d93_story.html>he
hoped the film would have a “soothing or even healing effect” on a
nation exhausted after yet another bitter and polarizing election.

But there’s one line
attributed<http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/341682/Abraham-Lincoln/341682suppinfo/Supplemental-Information>to
Lincoln that Daniel Day-Lewis, who plays the president, doesn’t utter
in
the film: “You may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool
some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all
the time.”

The omission makes sense. Not only is the line probably apocryphal, but
also, this Election Day just might demonstrate that you really can fool all
of the people — or at least enough of them — in the time it takes to win
the White House.

Venomous personal attacks and accusations of adultery, miscegenation and
even bestiality are as old as the Republic. Aaron Burr was the sitting vice
president when he killed Alexander Hamilton.

But while the line between fact and fiction in politics has always been
fuzzy, a confluence of factors has strained our civic discourse, if it can
still be called that, to the breaking point.

The economic boom and middle-class expansion of the postwar era encouraged
relative deference for officials, journalists and scholars. It’s true that
reporters and politicians had far cozier relationships, but the slower news
cycle allowed more time for verification and analysis.

Candidates accordingly believed that being caught in an outright lie could
damage their careers. (As Daniel Patrick Moynihan reportedly
said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”)
They tended only to bend the truth, not break it.

In 1948, President Harry S. Truman denounced Republican financiers as
“bloodsuckers” <http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=13007> and “gluttons
of privilege,” <http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=13000> but
grounded his inflammatory language in the facts of Congress’s legislative
record. He denied his “give ’em hell” reputation, saying
later<http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=74116>only that
“I used to tell the truth on the Republicans, and they called it
that.”

Two years later, Richard M. Nixon, running for the Senate from California,
said <http://www.nixonlibrary.gov/thelife/apolitician/thesenator.php> his
opponent, Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas, was “pink right down to her
underwear,” a red-baiting remark, but one that referred to statements she’d
made calling for global disarmament and civil rights for women and blacks.

The brass-knuckle 1964 campaign is remembered for Lyndon B. Johnson’s
alarmist “daisy ad,” which suggested that Barry M. Goldwater’s election
might lead to nuclear war. But it rested on statements Goldwater had made
indicating a loose attitude toward nuclear weapons. (“Lob one into the
men’s room in the Kremlin,” he once
joked<http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=26680>.)


The attack ads devised by the strategist Lee Atwater for Vice President
George Bush in the 1988 campaign, one of the dirtiest ever, were grounded
in at least a kernel of truth. Mr. Bush’s opponent, Michael S. Dukakis,
might not have deserved blame for the furlough program that let Willie
Horton commit additional crimes, but at least the program and prisoner were
real. Atwater exploited these events, but did not invent them.

At least four factors since the 1970s have lowered the cost for politicians
who lie and, more important, repeat their fabrications through their attack
ads. First is the overall decline in respect for institutions and
professionals of all kinds, from scientists and lawyers to journalists and
civil servants.

Second are changes in media regulation and ownership. In 1985, the
conservative organization Fairness in Media, backed by Senator Jesse
Helms, tried
to arrange<http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1320&dat=19850129&id=3zxWAAAAIBAJ&sjid=qukDAAAAIBAJ&pg=5080,4589117>a
takeover of CBS and “become Dan Rather’s boss.” It failed, but two
years
later conservatives set the stage for an even bigger triumph. For decades,
radio and television broadcasters had been required to present multiple
viewpoints <http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1880786,00.html>on
contentious public debates on the grounds that they were stewards of
the
public airwaves. But in 1987, members appointed by President Ronald Reagan
to the Federal Communications Commission
abolished<http://www.nytimes.com/1987/08/05/arts/fcc-votes-down-fairness-doctrine-in-a-4-0-decision.html>this
“fairness doctrine.” The change facilitated the creation of
conservative talk radio and cable outlets to combat perceived liberal bias.
Liberals followed suit with programming (albeit less effective) of their
own.

As this cacophony crescendoed, a third trend developed as political
operatives realized they had more room to stretch the truth. In 2004, an
aide to President George W. Bush dismissed a journalist for being part of a
“reality-based community” of people who “believe that solutions emerge from
your judicious study of discernible reality.” But even Mr. Bush believed
there were limits to truth-bending. The ads that attacked the military
service of Senator John Kerry came from the ostensibly independent “Swift
Boat Veterans for Truth.” After the ads aired, Mr. Bush belatedly called
them “bad for the system.”

A fourth factor: most news organizations (with notable exceptions)
abandoned their roles as political referees. Many resorted to an atrophied
style that resembled stenography more than journalism, presenting all
claims as equally valid. Fact checking, once a foundation for all
reporting, was now deemed the province of a specialized few.

But as this campaign has made clear, not even the dedicated fact-checkers
have made much difference.

PolitiFact has chronicled 19 “pants on fire” lies by Mr. Romney and 7 by
Mr. Obama since 2007, but Mr. Romney’s whoppers have been qualitatively far
worse: the “apology tour,” the “government takeover of health care,” the
“$4,000 tax hike on middle class families,” the gutting of welfare-to-work
rules, the shipment by Chrysler of jobs from Ohio to China. Said one of his
pollsters, Neil Newhouse, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated
by fact checkers.”

To be sure, the Obama campaign has certainly had its own share of
dissembling and distortion, including about Mr. Romney’s positions on
abortion and foreign aid. But nothing in it — or in past campaigns, for
that matter — has equaled the efforts of the Romney campaign in this realm.
Its fundamental disdain for facts is something wholly new.

The voters, of course, may well recoil against these cynical manipulations
at the polls. But win or lose, the Romney campaign has placed a big and
historic bet on the proposition that facts can be ignored, more or less,
with impunity.

Kevin M. Kruse<http://www.princeton.edu/history/people/display_person.xml?netid=kkruse>,
a professor of history at Princeton, is the co-editor, most recently, of
“Fog of War: The Second World War and the Civil Rights Movement.”


-- 
Art Deco (Wayne A. Fox)
art.deco.studios at gmail.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.fsr.com/pipermail/vision2020/attachments/20121106/89aebc25/attachment-0001.html>