Throughout America this election year, from the presidential race on down, the predominant political theme is truth. Every candidate is for it; every opponent, it would appear, stands for truth-telling's mortal enemy, lying, or one of its siblings - prevarication, misrepresentation, concealment or cover-up.
When President Bush says that Bill Clinton tries to have it both ways, we understand that one of those ways is a lie. When Clinton says that Bush cannot be trusted, and offers still another allusion to "read my lips," he is saying that the president does not tell the truth. No one is fooled as to what Clinton really means.Commercials for every conceivable public office now make almost casual use of words that once were taboo or fighting accusations: He lies, she lies. (For instructive examples of political commercials as the toxic waste dumps of the airways, see those for Missouri governor and attorney general.) Invariably, these assertions are accompanied by the pious complaint that the opponent refuses to discuss "real issues."
Not every assault on a candidate's truthfulness appears unremittingly savage. But behind the seemingly more amiable depictions of flips and flops is the unspoken mutual understanding: You know and I know that flips or flops, or perhaps both, are lies. So pervasive is the assumption that lies are the prevailing currency of political speech that Time has devoted a cover story to it.
As a voter and journalist, this will be my ninth presidential election. While it is likely that the past has become blurred from nostalgia (that golden first vote, cast for JFK) and from a memory dimmed by declining recollective powers, it also seems to me that politics has grown progressively more cynical over the years.
The New Cynicism, deeper and more pervasive than what had gone before, began to develop in the mid-1960s. Until then, Americans still had a strong predisposition to believe or trust their political leaders. People were shocked when President Dwight D. Eisenhower admitted that he had lied about the U-2 incident. How many people today would react with equivalent disbelief if they learned that the president had deliberately misled a foreign government?
I believe it is almost impossible to overestimate the effect of Vietnam and Watergate upon the decline of confidence in government and the attendant rise in cynicism about public officials. Much of Ronald Reagan's success can be attributed to the diminished estate of government and the public's growing disdain for politicians as usual.
Vietnam and Watergate, of course, were not the end of the matter. It was not that everybody talked about the deficit and did nothing about it; it was that everybody promised they would do something about it, swore they actually were fixing it while all along it was obvious to even the most gullible voter that nothing at all was happening.
The deficit, however, was and remains remote from most people's everyday experience. The crusher was the savings and loan scandal, an orgy of lying, looting and favoritism that proceeded while the highest people in government pretended that all was peaceful and quiet. Small wonder that politicians today appear to be obsessed with truth and lies.
I say appear to be, because at bottom their preoccupation really is with fixing and avoiding blame. Nobody wants to take responsibility for the current situation in federal, state or local government: The blame universally lies elsewhere. The easiest way to blame is to say that the opponent cannot be trusted, that he or she is lying about complicity in the problem or about the competence to solve it.
In an environment in which everyone accuses everyone else of lying, the truth itself become indiscernible, and hence no candidate can be held accountable. That is the cover of night under which candidates have chosen to operate. All around us they are snuffing out the candles while proclaiming loudly, Let there be light.