We stand today deep into the silly season of the 2008 presidential election; most of us have our dander up, and naturally some Obama partisans like Josh Marshall and Joe Klein have floated off on clouds of rhetorical overkill in an effort to push the idea that their opponent is somehow running an unusually dishonest campaign. Even aside from the partisanship, you have to be pretty willfully ignorant of history to think the 2008 race is at all exceptional in this regard, other than perhaps the degree of personal villification of one of the vice presidential candidates in a very short period of time. Now, personally I’m not as cynical as Jay Cost or Ross Douthat as far as saying “everybody does it, so what?,” but…well, I look at the accuracy of claims made in advertisements, speeches, etc. under three general categories:
(1) Is it literally true? Does it say anything factually false?
(2) Is it essentially true? Does it say something about the candidate or his/her opponent that is consistent with the point being made?
(3) Is it the whole truth, without any arguably important context or nuance omitted?
One of the reasons I enjoy writing longer-form blog essays is the freedom to drill down to all the relevant context and explain a point even in light of all the facts, all the context, all the nuance. But in the real world of short-attention-span politics, with its 30-second ads and soundbites, we have to accept that #3 is a hurdle that even the best-faith politicians frequently fail, and where politicians who do try to give the full context can end up losing their audience or tying themselves in “I voted for it before I voted against it” verbal knots.
That said, you do need to be able to defend a claim on both ground #1 and #2. If a claim is literally true but conveys a totally false image, you are basically in the Bill Clinton “it depends what the meaning of ‘is’ is” position; if it is intended to convey something people believe but rests on fabricated facts, that’s the Dan Rather “fake but accurate” defense. Either position is ultimately indefensible.
Let’s look at two main examples of recent controversies and how they measure up, as well as examining what I refer to as “McSame Syndrome.”