McCain and Palin Are Trying to Take Political Lying to the Next
Dimension

By Robert Parry, Consortium News. Posted September 15, 2008.

McCain and Palin reach a new level of campaign dishonesty as they tell
lies about their records and their opponent. But will they pay a
price?

Despite all the chatter about how "historic" Campaign 2008 has been,
it is the McCain-Palin ticket that it is truly testing the limits, not
of race or gender politics, but whether the United States is ready to
enter into a new dimension of political lying.

Until two weeks ago, it would have been hard to believe that any
political figure would have had the audacity to step into the national
spotlight by telling the bald-faced lies that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin
has. Yet, many Americans have embraced her enthusiastically and don't
want to hear anything negative about her.

Palin's most obvious lie is one that she has repeated over and over:
"I told Congress, 'thanks but no thanks' about that Bridge to
Nowhere." Now, however, anyone who has bothered to fact-check this
claim knows that Palin supported the bridge until Congress removed the
earmark and then she kept the money to use on other state projects.

Palin also presents herself as a "reformer" who can't stand earmarks
or the lobbyists who arrange such wasteful pork-barrel spending --
except that she hired Alaska's top Washington lobbyists to secure
millions of dollars in earmarks for her town, Wasilla, and for her
state, including sending off a wish list of nearly $200 million just
this year.

With the help of the lobbying firm and her annual treks to Washington,
Palin secured a stunning $27 million in earmarked funds for Wasilla, a
town then with about 6,000 residents. Some of Palin's projects were
considered such prime examples of Washington pork that they were cited
in anti-earmark reports compiled by none other than Sen. John McCain
earlier this decade.

When ABC's news anchor Charles Gibson asked Palin about her past
support of earmarks and her backing for the Bridge to Nowhere, Palin
simply refused to acknowledge that she had made misleading or false
claims about herself.

"It has always been an embarrassment that abuses of the ear form --
earmark process has been accepted in Congress," Palin said. "And
that's what John McCain has fought. And that's what I joined him in
fighting."

But Palin is not alone in simply denying reality. Her partner, John
McCain, has shown his own ability to not blush while lying.

On the ABC-TV show "The View," McCain was confronted with Palin's
contradictory record of arranging earmarks while selling herself as a
reformer. McCain simply ignored the facts and declared, "not as
governor she didn't."

McCain's Lies

But McCain now has his own long trail of stunning lies, both about his
opponent Barack Obama and McCain's dubious reputation for clean
politics. After presiding over a convention notable for its partisan
rancor -- including endless mocking of Obama as a "community
organizer" -- McCain said his presidency would be about eliminating
"partisan rancor."

Earlier in the campaign, McCain approved ads accusing Obama of
everything from causing $4 a gallon gasoline (a silly charge) to
stiffing wounded U.S. troops in Germany by canceling a visit because
he couldn't bring along cameras (a false accusation).

More recently, McCain and his team have blamed Obama for passing a law
that would require sex education for kindergarteners and for calling
Palin a "pig" when the Democratic nominee criticized McCain's economic
package by saying it was like "putting lipstick on a pig."

Though McCain himself had applied the common expression to Hillary
Clinton's health-care plan, Obama's use of the image was ripped from
its context and twisted into a "sexist" attack on Palin.

As for the kindergarten sex-education ad, the McCain campaign had
contorted Obama's support for a program that would teach young school
children how to avoid sexual predators into providing them
"comprehensive sex education."

When confronted on "The View" about these two dishonest ads, McCain
insisted that "actually they are not lies." He then went on to argue
that his own use of the "lipstick on a pig" remark was different
because he was talking about Clinton's health-care plan.

Barbara Walters, one of the program's co-hosts, challenged this
excuse, noting that Obama was speaking about change, not Palin.

McCain's response was that Obama "chooses his words very carefully,"
suggesting apparently that when McCain has used the phrase he doesn't.
McCain added as his defense that harsh things have been said about
him, too, and that "this is a tough campaign."

At the end of McCain campaign ads -- including others that have
compared Obama to Paris Hilton and distorted his positions on taxes,
health care and energy -- the voters hear McCain intoning, "I approved
this message."

Successful Strategy

All of this might not be so troubling to Americans who care about the
future of their democracy, except that the smears are working.

The McCain-Palin ticket is surging in the polls behind this strategy
of deliberate lies and deceptive rhetoric. Many national polls now put
the Republicans ahead in the presidential race and show them quickly
closing the gap with Democrats in congressional races.

Not only has the lying worked well in raising fresh doubts about Obama
and lifting the spirits of Republican activists, but it's had a
curious impact on the national press corps, which has difficulty
standing up to what might be called strategic lying that saturates the
media's capacity for fact-checking and plays on the desire to appear
"even-handed."

For weeks, the national press corps essentially has followed a "plague
on both their houses" approach to campaign distortions, even though
the McCain campaign was by far the more egregious -- and systematic --
in its pattern of misrepresentations.

Indeed, it seems that the McCain strategy included preemptive berating
of the news media for "bias" as a way to scare journalists away from
taking note of how McCain's strategic lying was reshaping the
electoral landscape.

It took the New York Times until Sept. 13 to publish a comprehensive
story about McCain's cynical approach to politics.

The Times story noted that McCain's "strategy now reflects a
calculation advisers made this summer -- over the strenuous objections
of some longtime hands who helped him build his 'Straight Talk' image
-- to shift the campaign more toward disqualifying Mr. Obama in the
eyes of voters."

The Times added that "for all the criticism [of the lies and
distortions], the offensive seems to be having an impact. It has been
widely credited by strategists in both parties with rejuvenating Mr.
McCain's campaign and putting Mr. Obama on the defensive since it
began early this summer."

Times columnist Bob Herbert made a similar point in a Sept. 13 op-ed,
writing: "While watching the Sarah Palin interview with Charlie Gibson
and the coverage of the Palin phenomenon in general, I've gotten the
scary feeling, for the first time in my life, that dimwittedness is
not just on the march in the U.S., but that it might actually
prevail."

McCain's Record

Beyond the studied anti-intellectualism -- even anti-realism -- now
surrounding the McCain-Palin campaign, there is another longer-term
question of whether McCain's current behavior is just a "campaign
mode" aberration or whether he ever deserved the favorable depiction
as a "maverick" and a "reformer."

Though McCain has bucked his party on some high-profile issues, such
as campaign finance reform and earmarked spending, his actual record
reveals him to be a doctrinaire conservative with his own checkered
past on ethics.

McCain, in effect, reinvented himself as a "reformer" in the 1990s
after he got caught in the late 1980s in a savings-and-loan
influence-peddling scheme with Cindy McCain's business partner,
Charles Keating.

Even in recent years while cultivating his reform image, McCain -- as
chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee -- has maintained cozy
relationships with business lobbyists and, indeed, stocked his
campaign staff with many of the insiders he rails against.

Yet, because of his long history of flattering press clippings -- he
once called the journalists on his "Straight Talk Express" his "base"
-- McCain seems to always expect gentle treatment, regardless of his
actions. That confidence has enabled him to get away with stating the
opposite of obvious truths and suffering little consequence.

For instance, when the New York Times published an article on Feb. 21
describing McCain's relationship with a telecommunication lobbyist,
his campaign issued a statement declaring that "John McCain has a
24-year record of serving our country [in Congress] with honor and
integrity. He has never violated the public trust, never done favors
for special interests or lobbyists, and he will not allow a smear
campaign to distract from the issues at stake in this election."

McCain issued this statement despite the clear public record about his
role as one of the so-called "Keating Five," senators who did favors
for savings-and-loan wheeler-dealer Charles Keating.

In 1987, Keating wanted to frustrate oversight from federal banking
regulators who were examining his Lincoln Savings and Loan
Association. At Keating's urging, McCain wrote letters, introduced
bills and pushed a Keating associate for a job on a banking regulatory
board. McCain then joined several other senators in two private
meetings with federal banking regulators on Keating's behalf.

Two years later, Lincoln collapsed, costing the U.S. taxpayers $3.4
billion. Keating eventually went to prison and three other senators
from the Keating Five saw their political careers ruined. McCain drew
a Senate reprimand for his involvement and later lamented his faulty
judgment. "Why didn't I fully grasp the unusual appearance of such a
meeting?" he wrote in his 2002 memoir, Worth the Fighting For.

But some people close to the case thought McCain got off too easy --
and actually may have been the senator most deeply entwined with
Keating. Not only was McCain taking donations from Keating and his
business circle, getting free rides on Keating's corporate jet and
enjoying joint vacations in the Bahamas -- McCain's second wife, the
beer fortune heiress Cindy Hensley, had invested with Keating in an
Arizona shopping mall.

In the years that followed, however, McCain not only got out from
under the shadow of the Keating Five scandal but found a silver lining
in the cloud, transforming the case into a lessons-learned chapter of
his personal narrative.

Nevertheless, years later when the Times article questioned just how
ethical the "new" John McCain really was, McCain lashed back with a
categorical statement that was categorically untrue, saying he had
"never done favors for special interests."

When one considers how other recent presidential candidates, such as
Al Gore in 2000, were treated for perceived misstatements about their
personal records, it's striking how effectively McCain has escaped
serious criticism for lying -- and how he has sustained his reputation
as a supposed "truth-teller."

So, perhaps, the current pattern of McCain approving dishonest ads and
embracing a calculated strategy of false statements about Barack Obama
shouldn't come as a surprise.

McCain now seems to have located a soul-mate in Sarah Palin, who
shares McCain's assuredness in making public statements that are
clear-cut lies and then insisting they are absolute truth.

The only remaining question is how well this strategy will work.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for
the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The
Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his
sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two
previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from
Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press &
'Project Truth' are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.