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Lies, Damned Lies, and Barack ObamaWhy isn't Obama stretching the truth more often?

By Farhad ManjooPosted Friday, Sept. 12, 2008, at 4:03 PM ET

Illustration by Rob Donnelly. Click image to expand. Since July, John McCain and his campaign have made 11 political claims that are barely true, eight that are categorically false, and three that you'd have to call pants-on-fire lies—a total of 22 clearly deceptive statements (many of them made repeatedly in ads and stump speeches). Barack Obama and Joe Biden, meanwhile, have put out eight bare truths, four untruths, and zero pants-on-fire lies—12 false claims. These stats and categories come from PolitiFact, but the story looks pretty much the same if you count up fabrications documented by FactCheck.org or the Washington Post's Fact Checker, the other truth-squad operations working the race: During the past two and a half months, McCain has lied more often and more outrageously than Obama. (Click here for a few caveats in this analysis.)

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Of course, it isn't possible to prove in any scientific manner that McCain is being more deceptive than Obama. Even if we could pin down every lie that each candidate tells, we'd never be able to reach a consensus about the seriousness of each deception. When the candidates spoke at Rick Warren's megachurch in August, both stretched the truth slightly. Which of their falsehoods is worse—Obama's claim that the abortion rate hasn't declined during the Bush years (it has), or McCain's claim that he'd give a $7,000 per-child tax credit to families when in fact his tax plan calls for a slight increase in the exemption on families' taxable income?

Related in Slate

John Dickerson wrote about the little fibs campaigns tell all day long. In "Trailhead," Christopher Beam declared that we've reached "the end of facts" in political campaigning. Beam also parsed what John McCain meant by his statement that America could be in Iraq for "100 years." Farhad Manjoo and Steven Johnson debated Manjoo's book True Enough.

Your answer depends on several factors—whether you care more about abortion or taxes, whether you're inclined to ascribe the candidates' deceptions to error or to political calculation, and, of course, whether you're supporting Obama or McCain. Judging political lies is a bit like trying to evaluate bad American Idol performances; we agree that they all kind of suck, but we can still have endless fights about which ones suck the least.

Some of McCain's recent claims, though, are the William Hungs of political lies: so heroically deceptive that anyone not blinded by partisanship feels the urge to cover his ears. Take McCain's ad claiming that Obama's "one accomplishment" on education policy was to push "legislation to teach 'comprehensive sex education' to kindergartners." It's difficult to find a single true word in the whole spot. The Illinois Senate bill the ad refers to was not Obama's legislation. (He voted for it but didn't write or sponsor it.) It was not an "accomplishment"—the bill didn't pass. Nor did it advocate teaching kids about sex before they learned to read, as McCain claims; it envisioned "age-appropriate" language instructing children on "preventing sexual assault," among other dangers, and it allowed parents to hold their kids out of these classes.

Obama, too, has run deceptive ads. He stretched the truth in blaming McCain for job losses in Ohio stemming from a DHL air cargo deal. He selectively edited a McCain quote to suggest that the senator favors trucking nuclear waste through Nevada but not through his home state of Arizona—a trick that renders the spot barely true. And Obama claimed that McCain doesn't support loan guarantees for the auto industry, which used to be true but no longer is. But Obama's ads employ the routine deceptions of politics—they exaggerate the opponent's positions, they play fast and loose with dates, they draw convenient inferences from strings of unrelated events. Yet they also contain a few actual facts. That's not high praise, but it reaches a higher standard than McCain's accusation that Obama called Sarah Palin a pig. Or McCain's insinuation that FactCheck.org found Obama making "false" attacks on Palin—a complete distortion of FactCheck's finding that anonymous e-mailers were attacking Palin.

The McCain camp's other sin is one of repetition: They keep saying things that have been proved untrue. In TV ads and nearly every stump speech, Palin has repeated the line that she stopped the federal government's plan to build the "bridge to nowhere," a claim that fact-check sites and nearly every major news organization have shot down. McCain keeps running ads—in English and Spanish—stating that Obama would raise taxes on the middle class when Obama's plan would actually lower taxes for most people.

On several occasions, meanwhile, Obama has adjusted his message when called out by fact-checkers. In February, Obama said that McCain believed the Iraq war would last 100 years; when fact-checking sites pointed out that McCain was referring to the peacetime presence in Iraq, Obama ditched the claim. Last month PolitiFact wrote that Biden was wrong to say McCain voted with Bush 95 percent of the time. Shortly thereafter, the Obama camp began using a more accurate measure, 90 percent.

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Farhad Manjoo is Slate's technology columnist and the author of True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society. You can e-mail him at and follow him on Twitter.

Illustration by Rob Donnelly.

COMMENTS

Notes from the Fray Editor

No-need-to-read-the-post, the-title-says-it-all department: Silas Porter with this "The Republicans would never vote for Jesus"; Lizzie's title was "Don't we have laws about truth in advertising?" –the thread is quite entertaining. Cracker's post, below, brought writer Farhad Manjoo into his Fray—he answered a couple of other readers too. There's a lot of discussion of that sex ed claim – the best discussion is probably here. And let's hear it for Todji's important point: "Lying is protected by the first amendment. Lying under oath is not."

Comments from the Fray

Even while still reading Manjoo's article I knew exactly the tone (and claims) that would be found in the Fray comments. Yet I soldiered ahead anyway and read several. I once read that there are two types of people: 1)those who read letters to the editor/comments and 2)those who don't. I guess I'm the former.

Am I alone in thinking that the tone of commentary has become insane? I guess Manjoo points it out when he mentions the fragmentation of the media effect on public opinion. I often find myself running into references to some "fact" in the comments online that then spills out to something more mainstream like an off-hand interview comment on a news program or overhead conversations out at restaurants or in lines. I wish I had a dollar for every time I've heard the Obama/Osama idiocy (both through media and in casual interaction).

--palmcanoe

(To reply, click here)

I'll tell you why he shouldn't embracing the lie-cause-nobody-cares-about-it-anyway-and-it-just-might-work bs: Because in the next campaign, should he win, people will talk about how an honest campaign can actually work. Facts won't be as easily dismissed. Pundits and bloggers will be able to point to this campaign as a positive example, and maybe encourage it's emulation by others. Our kids will have the opportunity to see that their elders actually practice what they preach, rather than face disillusionment when they figure out their heroes are compromised liars.

--saysyes

(To reply, click here)

The statement that facts no longer matter as much in a digital world strikes me as ill-informed. When exactly haven't human beings latched onto whatever baloney justified what they want to do? I am certain Cain slandered Abel. A cursory reading of American history, or just a quick check in on the Reconstruction period, would reveal that the truth has always been valued much less than a good lie.

And, it seems to me that articles like this one, products of the so-called "digital world," show that communication gives as well as it takes. After all this article is spreading corrections and analyses. Why exactly is it that the old one-to-many paradigm of communication is assumed to be so honest? I think it's because that mode of communication gave the appearance of being honest. I'd suggest that the discomfort with the "digital world" is that it does reveal conflicting versions of the truth, that what leads us to say its the father of lies is the very fact that it exposes the truth for what it is, most often a tissue of pleasing falsehoods.

--cracker

(To reply, click here)

This isn't an election of the base, not really. It might have been if McCain had totally failed to appeal to the Bush-loyalist base, but the selection of Palin has fixed that problem. If Bush was dead, I'd say she'd be his reincarnation, to a poorer family this time. Likewise, that selection seems to have awakened the Democrat base to the reality that the Republicans really do intend to carry on exactly the same course. Hence the big jump in donations last month.

This election will be about swing states, independents and Republicans who can't face more of the same regardless of their identification with the GOP. That being the case, honesty is the best policy for Obama. Forget about those who already know what they want to think. Work on those states and those demographics where you can shift the pendulum a couple of degrees.

--Mujokan

(To reply, click here)

(9/15)

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