Fact checking politicians seems like a normal course of action now. The procedure is simple: watch or listen to the individual, take in the information presented to you with a grain of salt, then learn about all the reported inaccuracies presented by the individual. I have been nearly overwhelmed by the topic of honesty and accuracy in politics lately, in every medium I read. Apparently politicians are wrong or misrepresenting information quite frequently lately (either that or we have just not been paying attention previously, which is a scary thought). Most likely due to a highly politically polarized nation, this election has called a lot of attention to accuracy and honesty.
With Obama and Romney both bending truths and misconstruing facts, who should we view this? Surely, a politician’s willingness to deceive has an adverse affect on how their persona is viewed; the nation does not want a liar as a leader. But how negatively should we allow our views on these politicians to be affected? Is the question even relevant? What does this say about our current state of politics?
Personally, I feel like half the problem is that we don’t know enough about the subject matter being stretched in the first place. Really, if, collectively, we all have a very firm grasp on most of the matters, it would make misrepresenting them much more difficult; political discussions regarding the current financial situation would be hard to represent if we are all familiar with how things operate in the first place, for example. The same goes for any subject. Granted, this does not excuse politicians and put the burden of honesty solely on the populus, but rather encourages more of an engaged discourse regarding our country’s future in the first place. While I don’t have the time to become an expert on tax code, I can get a better idea and have a firmer basis to evaluate answers (like what income brackets are affected more significantly, and so forth). Essentially, people better informed of the issues would force politicians to refine their answers or face even greater scrutiny.
The politicians themselves, however, need to change their course of action, as well. The deliberate misconstruing of facts, while common practice, is misleading. This is reflective of the candidates themselves. It doesn’t matter how close the race is; don’t deceive your constituents. Some information and statistics are inherently hard to extrapolate off of, or it is possible to interpret them in different ways, but it is possible to represent them appropriately (and if it isn’t possible, they really don’t serve a purpose). Honestly, candidates should be forced to provide access to the material they are quoting. Every other profession provides citations, so why should politics be much different? Tell me how you arrived at that conclusion and where you derived those numbers from. If your logic is sound, it will survive analytical scrutiny. The American people are more than capable of understanding these concepts, so stop arbitrarily espousing the conclusion of your thought process and show us how you arrived at it.
It is a scary thought, thinking about how the two, currently, most prominent politicians are getting things wrong and then wondering about how often other politicians are. If the two individuals in the spotlight feel compelled to do so and face scrutiny, how about the other members of our government who face less attention? I’ve read some statements from members who sit on science committees which are quite frightening (especially since they control governmental funds responsible for financing science related endeavors). So we can just take Obama and Romney as illustrating a larger issue.
A cure-all is, unfortunately, not possible overnight. However, discourse based on qualitative analysis would lend itself to more empirical and definable resolutions in our government. This would also cause a shift away from unnecessarily lofty rhetoric and would decrease divisiveness, as the focus would be on finding answers to the problems that face the U.S., as opposed to defining voting lines. Unfortunately, it is too late to punish either Obama or Romney for their lack of honesty, but it’s a perfect time to start asking our politicians “how did you get to your proposed solution?”. They are our elected representatives, after all.
–MP
Play The Objective 