Wednesday, September 10, 2008 - Posts
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When a politician says something, the assumption is that it adheres, however loosely or distantly or illogically, to the truth. This week has shown that assumption to be hopelessly naive.
First, the McCain campaign repeated the falsehood that Sarah Palin said, “Thanks, but no thanks” to the “Bridge to Nowhere.” (Really, she said, "Thanks" and "No thanks.") Then they suggested Obama wanted to teach kindergartners about sex—he did no such thing. Then they accused him of calling Sarah Palin a “pig with lipstick”—a stretch, even according to Mike Huckabee. And now they suggest—citing FactCheck.org, no less—that Obama propagated “misleading” rumors about Palin.
The FactCheck folks are displeased. Today they posted an article saying the McCain ad “distorts our finding.” They had called the Palin rumors “misleading,” but in no way suggested the rumors were coming from Obama. The Annenberg Center’s director, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, is mulling whether or not to take legal action, since the McCain ad technically violates their copyright policy. Jamieson tells me a statement may be forthcoming: “Earlier ads have done the same thing,” she writes. “I am trying to make sure we have identified all of them before issuing a statement.”
This cycle has seen a proliferation of fact-checking sites, from Annenberg’s FactCheck.org to CQ’s PolitiFact to the Washington Post’s Pinocchio-doling Fact Checker column. For a while, they seemed to have an effect. The campaigns started sending out “fact check” dossiers to back up their own ads. When Barack Obama claimed that “gas prices have never been higher,” PolitiFact corrected him, and he stopped making the claim. They also tweaked Joe Biden for saying that John McCain voted with President Bush 95 percent of the time; the Obama camp adjusted their statements to the correct figure of 90 percent.
Now, though, facts seem irrelevant, at least to the campaigns. “I think we may have had an impact earlier in the campaign,” says Viveca Novak of FactCheck.org, “but now we don’t seem to be having much of one.”
It’s not that the campaigns are ignoring the fact-check sites. They’re misusing them. The same week McCain misleadingly cited FactCheck.org, the campaign cherrypicked a sentence from PolitiFact about the Bridge to Nowhere, quoting them as saying, "It's true that on Sept. 21, 2007, Palin officially killed the project." They left out the part of the article about how she also supported it. The best part: The Obama camp cited the same article to back up its claim that Palin committed “a full flop.”
To be sure, this is what happens at the end of a close race. The truth proves malleable, the stakes get higher, and the window for voters to Google every statement a candidate makes narrows. One can also conceive of a candidate who’s a horrible liar but would make a better president. Lyndon Johnson, for example, liked to say his great-grandfather died at the Alamo. He died in bed.
Plus, the fact checkers don’t seem to mind. “It’s not really any different from what we’ve seen in American politics for decades,” says Bill Adair of PolitiFact. “These guys say what they want to say. My job as a journalist isn’t to get them to change their tune.” Brooks Jackson of FactCheck.org also dismisses the notion that they need to have an “impact.” “I think that’s the wrong goal to have,” he says. “For one thing, they’ll break your heart. For another thing, I’m old fashioned. My idea of a proper role of a journalist is not to be part of the contest.”
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In every election, recycling is inevitable. But rarely does a candidate (or his supporters) use the exact same attacks that were once leveled against him.
So it has been with Barack Obama and Sarah Palin. If some of the charges against Palin sound familiar, maybe it’s because they were the same arguments used against Obama by his primary opponents and by McCain himself before he picked Palin. Here’s a quick rundown of the accusations, and why they might ring a few bells:
She’s inexperienced. You’d think the Obama campaign would avoid this line of attack, given Obama’s own résumé. Apparently not. “Today, John McCain put the former mayor of a town of 9,000 with zero foreign policy experience a heartbeat away from the presidency,” said Obama spokesman Bill Burton the day McCain picked her. In response, McCain/Palin tried to shift the conversation to “executive experience.”
She’s just a pretty face. Joe Biden’s comment that Palin is “good-looking” got twisted from a self-deprecating joke into a slur. But others have tried to use Palin’s looks against her. Critics on the left commonly refer to her as a “former beauty queen” or, my favorite, “the woman who failed to become Miss Alaska,” as if that presages future failures.
She only gave a good speech. “Sarah Palin delivered a great speech, but we haven’t heard anything else about what she’s going to do,” said Arkansas Sen. Blanche Lincoln. Compare that to Hillary Clinton’s line that John McCain has “a lifetime of experience,” while Obama “has a speech he gave in 2002.”
She’s not right for Jews. Obama allies are capitalizing on Jewish discomfort with Palin, just as his opponents once suggested that Obama doesn’t suit Jewish interests. Rep. Robert Wexler has attacked Palin for appearing at a 1999 event with Pat Buchanan. Critics also point to a recent speaker at Palin’s church, David Brickner, executive director of Jews for Jesus, as reason for mistrust. Nor does it help that McCain passed over Joe Lieberman for the veep spot.
She’s a “gimmick.” In a now-famous hot-mic moment, former top McCain adviser Mike Murphy called the Palin choice “gimmicky.” Critics have long Obama of being an unserious candidate as well—a “lightweight,” a product of “hype” over substance. He has also been criticized for using campaign “gimmicks” like texting supporters his VP announcement.
Soon we will hear that Palin’s promises are “just words,” that’s she’s unprepared for 3 a.m. phone calls, and that she wanted to be vice president since kindergarten.
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