Tuesday, December 06, 2011

Romney Camp to America: We Will Lie to You!

In a rather startling admission, a top aide in the Romney campaign argued that political advertising is essentially agitprop and that lying is all but expected (Mother Jones). While I suppose we should not be surprised a Republican would say this off the record, behind closed doors, to hear it openly admitted is harder to believe. The advertisement in question came a few weeks back when a quote from Obama from 2008, saying ""Senator McCain's campaign actually said, and I quote, 'If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose." is truncated to Obama simply saying "If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose." Now I think the omission of the first part of the quote sort of changes the meaning, no? In fact, the Romney campaign was questioned at the time by reporters and saw nothing wrong with it, since he said those words. Soon operates will be cutting up single words by candidates so they can say things like "I hate Jews" or "America is a terrible place" and argue that they said that, more or less.

The actual quote: "First of all, ads are propaganda by definition. We are in the persuasion business, the propaganda business....Ads are agitprop....Ads are about hyperbole, they are about editing. It’s ludicrous for them to say that an ad is taking something out of context....All ads do that. They are manipulative pieces of persuasive art." Now while this is certainly true of advertising in general, which I also think is largely unethical as well (creating an aspirational culture that makes our lives seem terrible by comparison), I wonder if maybe politicians should be held to a higher standard. Unfortunately, the media is part of the game rather than the fourth estate that would call out these lies. As I have pointed out on numerous occasions, there inability to do the necessary and rather simple research to discredit false attacks against Gore and Kerry probably cost both the election, their framing of the 2000 recount might have undermined momentum for a perfectly legal and consequential overturning of the theft of the election and their unwillingness to question officials helped the Bush administration in the buildup to the Iraq War. 

If we want to stop this sort of absurd manipulation and allow individuals to chose candidates on merit and position rather than emotion and fear, we need an independent body that offers even a modicum of testing of the truth of ads. We need public financing of elections. And we need to hold people like this accountable for their actions and their intentions. Until we take these steps, American politics will continue to devolve toward that of a banana republic.

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