Posted 2014-April-27, 10:04
I am struggling with this, and I will try to explain. I think the anonymity bothers me more than the factual inaccuracy.
Going way back: In 1952, I came home from a Boy Scout meeting to find my parents listening to Joe McCarthy on the tv. I would love to see a text of the speech, but I am not sure anything he said was really factually false. As I recall, he said that Adlai Stevenson had, in the thirties (so maybe fifteen years ealrier than the speech) belonged to certain organizations, and that one or more of these organizations was now on the Attorney General's list of possibly subversive organizations. Perhaps this was so, or perhaps not, I don't know. The implication was that Stevenson was a Communist, which was beyond ridiculous, but I don't recall that McCarthy said so in those words. Certainly McCarthy was one of the worst, that's part of why I start with him, but whether even he should have been prosecuted for what he said in that speech is iffy.
And then we get into lawyers. I am not out to dump on lawyers, but I would rather that politics did not become a series of court cases.
In 1960, the first election I voted in, the alleged missile gap was a big deal. Eisenhower and Nixon (for the youngsters, Nixon was Veep under Ike, and then Kennedy's opponent in 1960) had let a dangerous missile gap develop. To put it bluntly, this was hooey. Should the lawyers have been involved?
I have already mentioned "I will not send American boys to do what Asian boys should be doing". Whooie, that was a biggie. If Goldwater had won in 64 and we went to war, at least we would have had to acknowledge that he did what he said he was going to do. But LBJ? I worked for his election. Someone told me that I had to be some sort of idiot to think of Johnson as the peace candidate. I think a case could be made that this deception made the Nixon presidency of 1968 possible, or even inevitable. Should the lawyers have been called in?
Move on to modern times. "If you like the health plan that you have, you can keep it. Period." I'm older now and more able to recognize bullcrap when I hear it, so I was not really taken in by this. But no, I don't want him fined or jailed for it. I believe the Dems will pay a price for this in November, but I am fine with letting the voters decide on the matter. And anyway, it wasn't really a lie. The person can keep that plan, he would just have to also get another approved plan. If for some idiotic reason he wanted two plans, he would be allowed to keep his current plan as one of them. This is absurd of course, but it is what we can expect if the lawyers get into it. Depends on what the meaning of "keep" is.
I repeat, i am not bashing lawyers. They have a job to do and they can largely be expected to do it well. I simply prefer that elections be settled otherwise.
I do, however, think that large, and I am not sure exactly what large means, financial sources should be disclosed. If I want to give someone a hundred bucks, that's nobody's business but my own (isn't that a Billie Holiday song?). But scale matters here. Somewhere between my hundred bucks and someone's hundred thousand bucks, the nature of the transaction changes. Or so it seems to me. Maybe the problem, part of it, is that the source is known to the candidate but not to the public.
Just a little more about money and politics. Of course FDR had money but the Dems could have run an actual donkey against Hoover and won. Truman didn't have so much money. Probably it was with Kennedy that the cash, and the power that went with it, really made a difference both in the nominating process and the general election. It was a close election. Money will continue to talk, but it does behoove us to try to keep it from totally monopolizing the conversation.
Finally, the voter probably has, today, more resources than ever before for determining whether a given statement is or is not factual. If this is not enough, hmmmm.
As I say, I am struggling with this.
Ken