Remember that movie “Liar Liar,” where Jim Carrey plays a lawyer who is magically forced to reveal whatever he is really thinking and it turns his life upside down? Mitt Romney suffered from a “Liar Liar” moment when we got to hear what he says in the privacy of his own base.
But Democrats had their own peek-behind-the-curtain snafu a few weeks earlier, at their convention, when they pretended that their delegates voted to put references to God and Jersusalem back in their party platform. “The motion is adopted,” the convention chairman, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, declared nervously on national television, even though everybody with ears could tell that the ayes failed to get a clear majority, let alone two-thirds of the vote.
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Clearly, the Keeping it Real party would never win an election, but if that were the goal, they'd start lying too. But it could serve a valuable purpose of raising the political cost of lyin. It could influence voters expectations.
I like it!
Paul Tsongas tried it up to a point (he insisted he was cured of his cancer, although he may not have understood that medically you are only cured until you aren't anymore). Let's be really real. Elections have by and large been votes against something, not for something, and sometimes by proxy.
The "rules" need to be structured to assume that each candidate and party will robustly participate in "Human Nature". Just like when someone does violence to us we don't personally go out and return the favor, we call the police. Human Nature is to clobber the other person. The "rules" are everything in the infrastructure, from rules to what a candidate need to run for office, to newspaper's publishing viewpoints, to TV coverage with content in mind (like NPR) as opposed to Human Nature ("oh, what a nice Panda). The "rules" now are rigged to favor the Democrats and the Rupublicans and keep third party and independent candidates out. Further, they are rigged to allow the parties to control the frame and the content of the dialogue. And, they are oriented around "who is winning" and "who said what that is controversial". England seems to greatly benefit from the BBC, and it is reported to be non-partisan. Too bad the US does not have something similar.
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Excellent article! As Pogo famously said "We've seen the enemy and he is us!". I'm in favor or more honesty, but to be perfectly honest, I don't think I can get past the "do these pants make me look fat" question!