OpEdge: Does the Public Care When Candidates Lie?

by Marc Jampole Perhaps the most talked-about moment in the second presidential debate was Mitt Romney’s unfortunate elision of “binders full of resumes of women” into “binders full of women.” Many Democrats and feminists have been giving Romney a hard time about the remark. The remark, as stated, does commodify women — but give the guy a break. It was a verbal flub and nothing more. I’m not voting for Mitt because I don’t like his stands and his plans, and I don’t think he would make a competent leader of a democracy, but I’m willing to give him a free pass on this remark and rather focus on his awful positions on women’s reproductive rights, health care, the fact that women still make less than men for the same jobs and other important issues. The election is too important to sweat the small stuff. The fact that the story Romney told about his binders was false raises a more important issue — lying by candidates. Romney said that he asked for the resumes, when in fact they had been given to him and his opponent in the election before the votes came out in Mitt’s favor. The Republicans have used these kinds of distortions as a major strategy of the campaign, as fact-checking services have revealed time and again. But does the public care if candidates lie? An opinion poll on the homepage of Yahoo! the day before the second presidential debate suggests that many do not. First, let’s be clear that these online polls are not scientific, since people can vote more than once using different computers and participants are not screened to represent an accurate demographic cross-section. Notwithstanding the inherent inaccuracies of Yahoo! polling, I am nevertheless completely shocked and dismayed by the results of the Yahoo! poll on candidates’ lying. Here’s what the approximately half million people said:

Do you expect candidates to lie during the debates?

Yes, it’s part of the game: 58%

No, they should be honest: 42%

Even if we factor in people voting twice and take into account the chatty but distorting way Yahoo! asks its questions—even when we consider all those factors, we can only conclude that a large part of the American public believes that its okay for our candidates and elected officials to lie to us. (BTW, I don’t want anyone to infer that I believe that conservatives condone lying more than liberals or centrists. I don’t, although I do believe that the current crop of conservative politicians do lie a lot more than other candidates, and a lot more than conservatives of the 1960s and ’70s did). Lying and corruption are supposed to be the exceptions that we root out of the system. We are supposed to be shocked when we see students in cheating scandals, scientists giving false results or executives cooking the books. We’re supposed to base our decisions on the truth and consider the liar a pariah. But evidently, large numbers of Americans have become ethically challenged. They believe that it’s not how you play the game, but if you win. They follow the cynical political philosopher Machiavelli and think that the ends justify the means. Is this what the American compact has come down to? Lie to get what you want. Marc Jampole is a poet and writer who runs Jampole Communications, a public relations and communications firm. He blogs several times a week at OpEdge.