The
Post-Truth Campaign (I like the title “the
post-truth campaign”)
By PAUL
KRUGMAN December 22, 2011
I
like the method of his argument as well: asking how do you feel if I slap back in
your face, as opposed to pointing out that it is wrong you slap in my face.
Suppose that
President Obama were to say the following: “Mitt Romney believes that
corporations are people, and he believes that only corporations and the wealthy
should have any rights. He wants to reduce middle-class Americans to serfs,
forced to accept whatever wages corporations choose to pay, no matter how low.”
How would
this statement be received? I believe, and hope, that it would be almost
universally condemned, by liberals as well as conservatives. Mr. Romney did
once say that corporations are people, but he didn’t mean it literally; he
supports policies that would be good for corporations and the wealthy and bad
for the middle class, but that’s a long way from saying that he wants to
introduce feudalism.
But now
consider what Mr. Romney actually said on Tuesday: “President Obama believes
that government should create equal outcomes. In an entitlement society,
everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort,
and willingness to take risk. That which is earned by some is redistributed to
the others.”
And in an
interview the same day, Mr. Romney declared that the president “is going to put
free enterprise on trial.”
This is every
bit as bad as my imaginary Obama statement. Mr. Obama has never said anything
suggesting that he holds such views, and, in fact, he goes out of his way to
praise free enterprise and say that there’s nothing wrong with getting rich.
His actual policy proposals do involve a rise in taxes on high-income
Americans, but only back to their levels of the 1990s. And no matter how much
the former Massachusetts governor may deny it, the Affordable Care Act
established a national health system essentially identical to the one he
himself established at a state level in 2006.
Over all, Mr.
Obama’s positions on economic policy resemble those that moderate Republicans
used to espouse. Yet Mr. Romney portrays the president as the second coming of
Fidel Castro and seems confident that he will pay no
price for making stuff up.
Welcome
to post-truth politics.
(post-truth politics in that political figures do not pay the
price for what he made up, rather than the fact that he made stuff up)
Why does Mr.
Romney think he can get away with this kind of thing? Well, he has already
gotten away with a series of equally fraudulent attacks. In fact, he has based
pretty much his whole campaign around a strategy of attacking Mr. Obama for
doing things that the president hasn’t done and believing things he doesn’t
believe.
For example,
in October Mr. Romney pledged that as president, “I will reverse President
Obama’s massive defense cuts.” That line presumably plays well with Republican
audiences, but what is he talking about? The defense budget has continued to
grow steadily since Mr. Obama took office.
Then there’s
Mr. Romney’s frequent suggestion that the president has gone around the world
“apologizing for America.” This is a popular theme on the right — but the
so-called Obama apology tour is a complete fabrication, assembled by taking
quotes out of context.
As Greg
Sargent of The Washington Post has pointed out, there’s a common theme to these
whoppers and a number of other things Mr. Romney has said: the strategy is
clearly to portray the president as a suspect character, someone who doesn’t
share American values. And since Mr. Obama has done and said nothing to justify
this portrait, Mr. Romney just invents stuff to make his case.
But won’t
there be some blowback? Won’t Mr. Romney pay a price for running a campaign
based entirely on falsehoods? He obviously thinks not, and I’m afraid he may be
right.
Oh, Mr.
Romney will probably be called on some falsehoods. But, if past experience
is any guide, most of the news media will feel as though their reporting
must be “balanced,” which means that every time they point out that a
Republican lied they have to match it with a comparable accusation against a
Democrat — even if what the Democrat said was actually true or, at worst, a
minor misstatement.
This isn’t an
abstract speculation. Politifact, the project that is supposed to enforce truth
in politics, has declared Democratic claims that Republicans voted to end
Medicare its “Lie of the Year.” It did so even though Republicans did indeed
vote to dismantle Medicare as we know it and replace it with a voucher scheme
that would still be called “Medicare,” but would look nothing like the current
program — and would no longer guarantee affordable care.
So here’s my
forecast for next year: If Mr. Romney is in fact the Republican presidential
nominee, he will make wildly false claims about Mr. Obama and, occasionally,
get some flack for doing so. But news organizations will compensate by treating
it as a comparable offense when, say, the president misstates the income share
of the top 1 percent by a percentage point or two.
The end
result will be no real penalty for running an utterly fraudulent campaign. As I
said, welcome to post-truth politics.
