Squashed

I know there are a few McCain supporters reading this, and I wonder if you could help me out on something. Can you find a single recent McCain ad that contains more true statements than false or deliberately misleading ones? Here’s the transcript of the latest McCain spot.  Here’s a post discussing it. It accuses Obama and Biden of “dismissing Palin as good-looking” and saying “she was doing what she was told.” Biden did say Palin was better looking than he was—though hardly in a way that dismissed her. The phrase “what she was told” referred to some inaccuracies in some of Palin’s statement’s about Obama’s record. Rather than accuse her of lying, somebody from the campaign suggested she may have been told something different. The third statement, that the campaign said Palin was lying is probably more or less true, both in the sense that she was misleading people on a number of issues and in the sense that the Obama campaign called her on it. So, there were three claims, only one of which was true. The ad concluded with the admonition, “How disrespectful.”

Now, were I on McCain’s advertising team, I would say that the ad had accused Obama, a black man, of not showing proper deference to a white woman. But I haven’t mastered the trick of sleeping at night after promoting that kind of politics.

Additionally, if somebody comes across a single recent Obama ad that fails the minimal more truth than falsehood test, let me know. I haven’t seen any of his like this yet.

In a previous post, I asked anybody to point out any Obama campaign ads that were as thoroughly false or misleading as the recent round of McCain ads. Jeff Miller rose to the challenge, pointing out six (1 2 3 4 5 6) Obama ads, all of which could be misleading to one degree or another. One ad had a picture that did not match the text. Others accused McCain of having held positions he had held without mentioning that McCain abandoned those positions after securing the primary. Some suggested that McCain wanted to cut funds for things like education without mentioning that these were part of broader domestic funding cuts. Perhaps the worst of the lot stated that McCain “voted to cut education funding” and listed five votes. Only one of those was for an actual cut in education funding. The others were votes against increases in funding or votes for smaller increases.

To be clear, I do not approve of these negative and potentially misleading ads—but I’m realistic enough about my politics to know that this sort of thing is par for the course. I wish Obama wouldn’t do it—but he’s running for political office, not canonization. And in fairness to the political advertisers, putting all the relevant context in a 15 or 30 second spot is a little impractical. If McCain wants to tell his side of the story, he’s welcome to do so. In short, in politics, the truth tends to come in shades of gray. Objective truth is difficult to come by. One person might call a policy disastrous. The other might consider it a very good policy. One person’s refusal to extend a tax giveaway may be another’s tax raise. I understand that there is room for well-meaning people to disagree both on priorities and on how to interpret the facts.

But if political truth is blurry, lies are crystal clear. Stretching the facts is different than fabricating them. The recent McCain ads have been littered with statements and accusations that are wholly unsupported by facts. Quotes are taken so far out of context that they no longer retain even a shadow of their intended meaning. Both sides are guilty of skewing information for their benefit—but the McCain campaign is the only one just making stuff up.