Pants on fire

Ten days before a presidential election is no time to talk about telling the truth. Just ask the candidates.

 

In a widely publicized media moment yesterday, President Barack Obama said that Mitt Romney is “a bullshitter." Romney put things a little more delicately, saying that “…the president tends to, how shall I say it, to say things that aren't true."

It’s certainly nothing new. As far back as 64 B.C., says classics professor Dr. Philip Freeman, we can find a candidate being advised to “promise everything to anyone,” assured by the knowledge that a master campaigner “only lived up to the promises that benefitted him.” These directives from “Commentariolum Petitionis” (literally the “little book of electioneering”), which Freeman translated into “How to Win an Election,” were good strategies even then: Marcus Cicero would apply this advice from his brother Quintus and win Rome’s highest office that same year.

Of course, Cicero never had to deal with social media or a “digital world in which everything is recorded and scrutinized,” said Freeman at a Dallas Museum of Art event on Thursday. “It was a lot easier to lie to voters in the days before YouTube. Even 10 years ago, campaigns didn’t have to send out the spin doctors after every event, public or private,” he said.

Ah, yes. In case we weren’t sure what to believe, the campaigns provide us a spokesperson to explain it all.

“As long as politicians have been politicking, spinners have been spinning,” said Ivor Gaber, professor of broadcast journalism, noted in his “Lies, Damn Lies and Political Spin” research article. “As the politician attempts to stay ‘on message,’ the media advisor stands by ready to ‘spin’ should the politician trip up,” he says.

In other words, they adjust the candidate’s lies to make it something palatable that we, the voters, can swallow.

Call me cynical, but I tend not to believe them. These spokespeople come across as bigger liars than their bosses, the politicians, because they don’t follow the most basic ethical guidelines of their profession. Tell the truth. Act in the public interest. Correct a mistake, don’t cover it up.  

But as sad as it makes me, I have no illusions that this will change overnight. Instead, I choose to view it as a specialized art form—a twisted talent of bending words to fit a unique need. As George Orwell said in his essay, Politics and the English Language, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”