Editor's letter: A plea for candor

last updated 8 January 2015

Can you handle the truth? Ethicist Bruce Weinstein would like to think so. In The New York Times this week, Weinstein assails Barack Obama and Mitt Romney for trying to win this election with “shameful” attack ads, distortions, and scare tactics, combined with proposals that deliberately omit any painful details and whose math does not compute. Is it really so “unrealistic and naïve,” Weinstein asks, to expect candidates to put aside their “unbridled ambition,” and speak honestly to American voters about what ails us, and what bitter medicine we need to swallow?

Alas, Weinstein’s worthy plea shall fall on deaf ears. By its nature, politics screens out or corrupts the truth-tellers; you rise in that game only by pleasing 51 percent of the voters. Presidential candidates are, by definition, people of colossal ego and ambition, and they and the professional manipulators who surround them know from long experience that the surest way to win elections is to inflame voters’ fears, stoke their resentments, and pander to their selfish, short-term interests. Honesty? It’s called “a gaffe,” and will launch $25 million in scornful attack ads. The two campaigns may offer very different general philosophies, but they share a fondness for half-truths. Obama/Biden’s: If we just raise taxes on the top 1 or 2 percent, we can put off dealing with exploding Social Security, Medicaid, and social service costs until…well, later. Romney/Ryan’s: We can wipe out a $1 trillion annual budget deficit without a penny in new taxes, by simply cutting everyone’s taxes even further, taking an axe to unspecified spending, and leaving society’s losers to their fate. Can you handle the truth? The candidates obviously don’t think so.