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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

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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.

This is exactly what's so puzzling about Obama's strategy—why is he paying any attention to the fact-checkers? So far, McCain has seen little blowback from lying. Polls show that he's perceived as more "honest and trustworthy" than Obama and that the public believes his claim that Obama would raise taxes on the middle class. When MediaCurves showed the Obama-called-Palin-a-pig ad to a focus group of women, many came out thinking that Barack Obama had a gender bias. Some of these surveys might simply reflect McCain's post-convention, post-Palin bounce—and perhaps they'll recede as the weeks go on, especially if the media focuses on his attacks.

But it wouldn't be surprising if McCain's lies worked. In my book True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post-Fact Society, published earlier this year, I argued that in the digital world, facts are a stock of faltering value. The phenomenon that scholars call "media fragmentation"—the disintegration of the mass media into the many niches of the Web, cable news, and talk radio—lets us consume news that we like and avoid news that we don't, leading people to perceive reality in a way that conforms to their long-held beliefs. Not everyone agrees with me that our new infosphere will open the floodgates to fiction, but it's clear that the McCain camp is benefiting from some of the forces I described.

In particular, McCain is feeding off long-held conservative antipathy to the mainstream news media, the same force that propelled the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth four years ago. The Swift Boat message was conceived on talk radio; in the months before they caught the attention of TV producers, the vets appeared on hundreds of local radio stations across the country to push the story that the media wasn't telling the whole truth about Kerry. By the time they'd raised enough money to run TV ads, the Swift Vets had built up a huge network of people ready to defend their claims. These networks managed to render fact-checking not just ineffective, but countereffective—when newspapers pointed out flaws in the Swift Vets' claims, the Vets' defenders would pounce, arguing that the very act of fact-checking proved that the media was in the tank for Kerry.

The same dynamic is at work in the Palin rollout: "The more the New York Times and the Washington Post go after Sarah Palin, the better off she is, because there's a bigger truth out there and the bigger truths are she's new, she's popular in Alaska, and she is an insurgent," Republican strategist John Feehery told the Washington Post. "As long as those are out there, these little facts don't really matter."

Obama has inherent, obvious disadvantages in pushing a message in which "little facts don't really matter." For one thing, he's boxed in by his oft-repeated search for a different kind of politics. But given the tenor of the campaign, Obama's audience might be happy to see him take the low road. In the past, Democratic voters have been willing to accept lies. Researchers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that in 2004, the Kerry campaign managed to convince Americans that 3 million jobs had been lost during George W. Bush's first term (at the time of the election, it was less than 2 million) and that Bush "favored sending American jobs overseas." (He didn't.) Kerry and others on the left repeated these claims often, and in time they took root.

The misstatements of 2004 suggest a category of lies that Obama could get away with—ones that the public is already primed to believe about McCain. McCain's signature policy goal is cutting out earmarks. But as the Washington Monthly's Steve Benen points out, in promising to veto all earmarks, McCain has inadvertently called for cutting some popular programs—including all U.S. assistance to Israel, which is technically provided through a kind of earmark. Of course McCain doesn't really want to stop giving aid to Israel; an ad that suggested McCain's cost-cutting zeal would lead to abandoning Israel would be as dishonest as McCain's sex-ed ad. But it might also be effective, reinforcing the idea that McCain wants to cut too much.

Or what about that 100-years war? Picture an Obama ad showing McCain saying that the war in Iraq will last 100—or even 1,000!—years. The ad patches in footage of McCain singing "bomb Iran" and describing all the devastating effects of war. Actually, that ad exists—a comedy group posted it on YouTube in February. Nearly 2 million people have watched it. It's hilarious, effective, and a complete lie. Obama's advisers should be pushing him to approve that message.

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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

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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

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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

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(9/15)

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