Liar, Liar

by Matthew Buckley

No doubt about it, I am a political junkie. Any news show, pundit program, or public affairs special you can name, I have probably watched. Heck, I even know the differences between C-SPAN and C-SPAN2, which has to put me in a very small class of people.

The shows themselves are only about ninety percent of the fun. Since politicians can typically arrange with television stations when to run their campaign advertisements, they aim for particular audiences. Since politicians try to aim for civic-minded individuals, this means they run their advertisements smack in the middle of all my shows. As a political junkie, I love political advertisements. Some days, when all I see is political television shows interspersed with political advertisements, I’m in hog heaven.

The last few weeks, though, I’ve been pretty troubled...by the dishonesty in political commercials. (As my roommate points out, it makes about as much sense to be troubled by the sun coming up in the morning.) Don’t get me wrong. I’m a pretty red-meat conservative, and totally understand taking pieces of an opponent’s record and making that an issue. If you represent an environmentalist district and your opponent is a Sierra Club member who wants to impound every chainsaw in the US, pointing that out is legitimate.

However, I have my limits. A recent ad campaign launched by the Michigan Republican Party announced that Democratic Congressman David Bonior “voted to allow judges to let drug dealers and even violent criminals out of prison early.” A photo of Bonior is flipped up on the screen, and then text blocks screaming the words “rapists” and “drug dealers” emerge. Why, Bonior wants to help these people? Rapists and murderers? What is this world coming to?

As a Republican, I knew this ad had to be too good to be true. Most politicians are smarter than to sign bills along the line of, oh, say...H.R. 0001 Early Release for Rapists and Drug Dealers. I might disagree with Bonior politically, but I suspected something else was up.

As I suspected, Bonior didn’t really vote for such a release. The actual bill at issue was one which tried to undercut the power of federal judges when dealing with cases involving prison overcrowding. What Bonior actually voted for was the position that judges should retain their ability to decide these cases, even if their rulings occasionally led to the release of violent offenders. (Hint to the state GOP: Don’t run advertisements whose fundamental claims are misrepresentations when the relevant misrepresentation can be discovered by anyone with a pulse, an Internet connection, and five free minutes.)

So the GOP claim is literally true, yet clearly a stretch. It’s not as if Bonior’s position can’t be criticized — there may well be merits to taking these sorts of decisions out of judicial hands. But why run a nuanced ad dealing with these subtleties when one could simply tar Bonior as a soft-on-crime lefty? Clearly, the temptation was too much for the Republicans.

Democracy is hardly perfect, but it’s the best system we’ve got. For democracy to work well, though, we need accurate representations of political positions. Given that, the electorate in theory is free to pick the candidates and positions that they prefer. Sure, I’m a realist, and I know that a perfect world of political campaigning will be a long time coming. However, we can certainly note that certain claims, i.e. “David Bonior wants to let rapists move into YOUR neighborhood — right now!!!,” are garbage. Putting these claims out with the direct intention of suckering swing voters makes a mockery of political advocacy.

If this was an isolated ad, it might be one thing. If it was really only a problem in national politics, it might be something else. What actually seems to be going on is widespread exaggeration of people’s claims, ignoring that one’s claim are essentially lies. It’s even happening right here at U-M, all the time.

It’s no secret that BAMN and other radical groups in support of affirmative action have picked up the tactic of calling opponents of affirmative action “racists.” Recent controversy about naming a Residential College reading room after longtime professor Carl Cohen is only the latest in a long line of such attacks.

Whoever floated this idea had to have known it would be controversial, since Cohen has been a leader in discovering information about the University’s affirmative action policies. Combining this search for knowledge with opposition to affirmative action apparently makes one a dangerous racist indeed. In last Thursday’s Daily, a letter to the editor by LSA junior Kevin Jones claimed that Cohen “has expressed blatantly racist views concerning African American students on this campus[.]...He has published articles (that can be [found in] various databases on the Web) ... explicitly denouncing the presence of African Americans in institutions of higher learning.”

I suspect that what Cohen actually “denounces” is something like this: some African-American students attending the University gained admission with scores that, had they been the scores of white students, would have gotten them rejected. That race-based disparity, he submits, is problematic. This is not the same as the claim above that Cohen denounces “the presence of African Americans in institutions of higher learning.” What affirmative action opponents believe is hardly that broad.

We might also note that Jones’ letter to the editor is laudably clear about its claim that Cohen is a racist. In fact, he claims that apparently anyone with a computer and some time can find obvious evidence from the Internet of Cohen’s racism. Articles in databases will prove it! Well, I ran a few Yahoo searches, and while I did find that Cohen opposes affirmative action and gets quoted in lots of newspaper articles about the subject, I simply couldn’t find evidence of real racism. This, one might suggest, is hardly a surprise. If Jones actually had a damning quote from Cohen’s mouth indicating real racism, it would have been used in his letter to the editor.

This by itself is as bad as the GOP’s ridiculous attack ad. Jones will never give you a premise-to-conclusion argument showing that “affirmative action opponent” equals “racist,” since it can’t be done. Of course, Jones’ letter is simply a quick smear hit-and-run, so he probably doesn’t care — the connection between opposing affirmative action and racism is probably obvious in his mind. But is there any doubt that his rhetoric, which is just as deceptive as the Michigan GOP’s crime advertisements against Bonior, only prevents us from finding solutions to national problems?

It’s a cliché nowadays to say that sticks and stones can break bones, but that words can’t harm. In politics, however, since sticks and stones aren’t acceptable weapons, words have to serve instead. Politicians employ words with the specific purpose of hurting one another. Given this, politicians have a responsibility to use their nouns, verbs, and adjectives accurately. They have a duty, to the public and to their opponents, to be fair.

When they don’t, the process of democracy suffers. I concede that extrapolated arguments and ridiculous assessments of one’s opponents are easy, tempting, and occasionally effective. However, we ought to aspire to have political debate as a forum in which we articulate and defend our own positions, rather than one in which we tell half-truths about the positions of others. MR

This article was published in the 28 October 1998 edition of The Michigan Review (Volume 17, Number 3).
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