The Politics of the People

[in Seacoast Sunday (Portsmouth Herald) as an op-ed under their different title ("Voters have power to clean up political process") and in slightly different form: 9-6-09]

The Politics of the People

Most of the people I know love this country but hate its political style: the seemingly endless yelling, manipulation, misrepresentation, lying, malice, domination by money, and frequent placing of party ahead of the national interest. In a democracy, one writer said, you get the government you deserve. I'm not sure about that, but we do get the political culture we deserve, because we help to create that culture by tolerating it, even if we do not directly add to the noise. We can deserve better.
The ideas that follow do not touch the content of specific political issues like health care, energy, environmental degradation, criminal justice, or marriage. What they touch is the way the political professionals, the media, and the people carry on the conversation that shapes elections, which in turn determine legislation. My hope is that these ideas might appeal to conservatives, liberals, and libertarians, or even Republicans and Democrats. If we agreed on these principles, we would improve the political world itself. The alternative is continually increased misinformation and cynicism, which should be unacceptably bitter fruit for a free society.
A lot of what I'm talking about is political advertising and campaigning, but I'm also thinking about the sources of news and political analysis. MSNBC, Fox News and many bloggers and talk show hosts are often as adversarial as the national parties; they are like opposing lawyers. CNN (except for Lou Dobbs), CBS, NBC, ABC, and the newspapers--and eventually the voters--are a sort of jury. But in the months before the elections, before we vote, we the people are the presiding judge. It is our court. It's time to issue some instructions to the jury, some reminders to ourselves, and some contempt-of-court rulings.
For me the most disappointing and alarming moment in the 2008 campaign occurred when candidate Obama ducked this whole issue during the Presidential debate moderated by Bob Schieffer of CBS. The campaign as a whole had fallen to a dismal level. PolitiFact.com, a non-partisan, Pulitzer Prize-winning reality check on candidates' and partisans' claims, had judged at least one of the Obama ads as "Pants on Fire"--that is, even below the level of False, which lay below Barely True and Half-true (as well as Mostly True and True). Eighteen of his campaign's claims had been rated as False. Schieffer asked the candidates to comment on the level of nastiness that had become pervasive in the campaign. Obama said, "We expect Presidential campaigns to be tough." That is, he essentially accepted the nastiness as inevitable and ignored the falsehoods. In other words, just about anything goes. What disappears first under this banner is the truth, which means the integrity of our processes and ultimately of our elections. Is our democracy indifferent to that?
The McCain campaign was worse, far worse. It "won" many more "Pants on Fire" awards; at one point in the final weeks before the vote, 40% of the McCain campaign's claims had been rated as either False or Pants on Fire. (However in McCain's best moment he unambiguously rejected a supporter's wild claim that Obama was personally traitorous.)
Why should the electorate accept such a miserable standard in the first place? This issue is fundamental to our ability to ground policy choices in reality. To deal with it by saying that campaigns are tough is to throw in the towel, to treat truth and responsibility in campaigning as an impossible ideal. We do not do that with truth in advertising. Even though we depend on corporations economically, we hold them to a standard of honesty in the claims they make as they seek our dollars. Why should we be less insistent that seekers of our votes must meet at least a minimal standard as well?
The practical answer is, ironically enough, the First Amendment. It is all but impossible to separate freedom of speech from the freedom to spin, or even to lie--if one is talking about laws or regulation. But with one exception I am not talking about laws or regulation. I am talking about pushing back against unscrupulousness and cynicism--pushing back through every form of self-expression our society offers, creating a different and more empowering kind of argument, so that the next time a candidate is challenged on his or her campaign's falsehoods or other distortions, he or she will have to respond in a serious way.
The exception, one place where law and regulation do have a constitutionally feasible role, was demonstrated recently in a chilling prelude to the 2010 campaigns, which are already beginning. One of the industry-sponsored players in the debate over clean energy legislation distributed fake letters allegedly from grass-roots organizations--organizations that did not actually support the coal industry's position. The level of concreteness as well as bad faith in such dirty tricks should be recognized in the criminal code, just as slander, libel, and defamation of character--other abuses of free speech--are. Such gross perversions of our politics should be treated at least as severely as deliberate falsehood in advertising is. But whether or not we can bring more such flagrant abuses of democracy into the courtroom, we can at least bring them and other false and irrational claims into a steadier light and hold the perpetrators accountable. Otherwise honesty, accuracy, and good faith will be increasingly endangered species. We need to protest, not acquiesce, when surrogates and candidates--even our own candidates--demonize or offer cartoon versions of their opponents or their opponents' positions. The public needs to pay more attention to the trustworthy truth squads like PolitiFact and thus to give them more leverage on the campaigns. If we do not do better at this than we did in 2008, the corruption of our political process will accelerate, and we will have only ourselves to blame.