Look: there are lies and there are lies and everybody knows this, and even knows how to tell what the differences are in degree of moral gravity; but almost no one owns up to this truth out loud (another lie) –at least not for the record, and certainly not while in public life or in the process of trying to get there. I understand that and also that some of the allegations of lying in campaigns this year do concern large and consequential and disqualifying lies that should bar a person from holding office. What gets me is that in this seasonal din of charges, in which just about everyone has accused everyone else of telling some lie, the giant, controlling lie that is at the heart of most of their arguments, whether Democrat or Republican, incumbent or challenger, goes unremarked and unpunished. That is because they’re all in it together–and have been for decades. Yes, each party has its own particular version of the lie and derides the other’s as baloney. But the lie is the same. It is that the American people can have something–no, not just something, pretty much everything–at no additional cost, possibly even at a saving, maybe without even paying at all! Just elect us, they say, and you’ll see.
And so, of course, we have elected them, and we have seen.
Sometimes the public as a whole is denounced as being responsible for the mendacity of the candidates on this score. The public demands that this fairy tale be true, the argument goes, and thus creates a pressure to go along that the poor politicians can’t be expected to resist or even to argue with a little. But I don’t think that begins to excuse the generations of politicians who have taken this most natural wish to have it all for free as a marching order, and have invoked it as an excuse for (1) lying about their capacity to fulfill an impossible demand, (2) encouraging people, by their lie, to believe that it can be achieved and (3) subsequently committing and expending public funds as if they themselves had begun to believe the agreeable fiction.
Interestingly, although they do have terrible battles across party lines over whose version of this fraud is the “right” one, there tends to be a kind of bipartisan rallying to reprimand anyone who has the temerity to speak the truth publicly about the numbers. Never mind which party is in office and which is out when it happens: the opposition will invariably whoop that the person who dared to commit the forbidden act of simple arithmetic in public is a shameless taxer and would-be wrecker of every social-insurance benefit the nation holds dear. The denounced one’s own party will grumble about how politically reckless it was, how dumb and so forth. The most recent object of this kind of dual assault is OMB director Alice Rivlin, whose crime was laying out the available budget choices honestly for the president who will have to make them.
In the minds of many, perhaps even most in the political/governmental complex, you aren’t supposed to do that–and when you do and, worse, when your analysis is leaked to the press, woe is you. You have undermined the most sacred falsehood of politics, the one that all must venerate. There is a long and depressing history here. One of Lyndon Johnson’s major mistakes was refusing to own up to the financial costs of the war in Vietnam; he didn’t want his new Great Society programs to be denied funds and thought he could somehow mask the rising price tag of the combat–a long stride into the deception that helped to undo him. The Reagan government insisted the country could have tax cuts and vastly increasing defense expenditures, and somehow not incur the monstrous budget deficits it did, with the ensuing ill effects on the economy. The original Clinton health plan was presented to us as one that would increase by tens of millions the number of people covered without either increasing costs or diminishing in any way the medical services currently available to those who are covered. Reportedly, those who argued for acknowledging the costs in all these ventures and either trimming back the enterprise or cutting other big-ticket programs or raising taxes to meet them were reproached and, in some instances, cut “out of the loop,” roughly the equivalent of life without parole in Washington.
For those who still refuse to see the light, Walter Mon-dale’s’ dismal defeat after he publicly announced he would raise taxes if elected is the cautionary tale, for although no one thinks he would have beat Reagan if he hadn’t said it, no one thinks it exactly helped him either. I’ll buy that, but I won’t buy the implication that lying about the numbers is good politics or survival strategy. Either the public doesn’t believe the yarn or, worse, it does and the politician can’t deliver on his impossible promise (“read my lips”), at least not without fudging the figures or inflicting pain somewhere he said he wouldn’t. Then comes the revenge. Look around you at the wreckage-strewn political landscape. Was it created by smart politics? I have a revolutionary idea. Since the electorate appears not only to punish those who tell the truth about these things, but also, in eventual outraged disappointment, to punish those who don’t, why not tell the truth? Politicians, think about it. They’re going to get you anyway, and this way you might even get into heaven, or at least get your self-respect back here on earth.
