Truth in advertising. I'm sure this isn't the first time you've heard this phrase. For those of us who have spent time in the field of advertising, it's an ethical mantra you should live by. Sure, you can push it to a degree, but when it comes down to it, what you put out there had better be far more factual than false.
In the waning days of this year's historical election, "truth in advertising" is something I think about every single day. I cannot escape the constant barrage of ads in every medium from every candidate from county commissioner to president of the United States of America. I also cannot escape that fact that "truth in advertising" is lost during virtually every political cycle.
In the spirit of the mantra, let me be completely honest. I am a Democrat. I am not ashamed of that fact; I am proud. I believe, as a wise man who grew up during the Great Depression used to say, that the Democrats are for the "little guy" and the "working man." I won't take this opportunity to discuss all of the convincing reasons to be a Democrat, because my party is just as guilty of violating the marketing mantra as any party. And why not? "Politics as usual," to use another familiar phrase, makes it all so very easy.
While I am a Democrat, I'm also a journalist by training. In journalism, you learn how to put your own opinions, experience and emotions aside to report a story fairly, honestly, equally and in totality. Of course, you shouldn't believe that all journalists actually adhere to this theory, but I'll save that topic for another blog.
If you can put your own affiliations aside and just listen or read political ads like someone who is either truly independent or simply uniformed, you really wouldn't know which candidate you should vote for. Why? Because you have no idea who's telling the truth. If you believe what you hear, frankly, you'd come up with a write-in candidate, like your favorite teacher, and vote for him or her. If you believe all you hear, Democrats are gun-control, anti-business, abortionist, tax-and-spend, socialist liberals, among other things. Republicans are gun-toting, war-mongoring, gas-guzzling, major corporation, friends of the incredibly wealthy. Why would you vote for a candidate for either party?
The fact that the truth is difficult to discern in modern elections has led to a surge of "fact-checkers" and myriad organizations that proclaim to take neither side. That claim is highly suspect as well. So, how can voters really know what's fact and what's fiction?
The truth is, most of what's said is gray rather than black or white. Anyone can "spin" the facts however they chose and not be called an outright liar for doing so. There are lies by omission and obfuscation but, perhaps, outright.
So, how does one candidate claim his or her opponent voted against an issue while the other candidate swears he or she did not? Because that's how our lawmaking process works. Legislators don't vote on bills pertaining to a single issue. In fact, some bills contain measures that bear absolutely nothing in common with each other. To paraphrase something Mark Twain once said, there are two things you should never watch being made -- sausage and the law. That's because both are made by chopping a lot of pieces beyond recognition and wrapping them tightly in a single casing that's supposed to make them look better and make them easier to swallow.
How is it that so many, often entirely unrelated items get placed into a single piece of legislation that requires a single yay or nay to pass or fail? Let's take the ever-infamous "Bridge to Nowhere." Federal funding for an expensive bridge that would have connected a handful of people to the rest of the world was not the only issue addressed in this piece of legislation. Had it been, it would have been soundly defeated. Black and white. But it was a paragraph in a $286.5 billion bill that included major highway, transit and safety projects. So, Senator McCain becomes one of four people in conference committee who no-votes the entire bill because of the infamous bridge and other projects he viewed as unnecessary "pork." Senator Obama votes for the bill because, among other viable projects, his home state of Illinois would benefit from the funding. That doesn't mean he "voted for the Bridge to Nowhere." He voted for billions of dollars for transportation projects in the state he represents. Now, that's the truth.
The only way to truly know how an elected official really voted is to have him or her vote on single issues. It's equivalent to having a line-item veto. In real world, we know that will never happen because if it did, absolutely nothing would be accomplished in Congress. That leaves us -- the electorate -- to try to sort out fact from fiction and truth from lies. And that might be simply impossible.
