Hillary Clinton Ran a Corupt Campaign and Wants to Run Again?
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History Dept.
Are Clinton and Trump the Biggest Liars Always to Run for President?
A short history of White House fabulists.
In their personalities and their politics, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump might non have much in common, but in the public eye they share one glaring characteristic: A lot of people don't believe what they say. In a July New York Times/CBS poll, less than one-tertiary of respondents said Clinton is honest and trustworthy. Trump'south scores were well-nigh the same.
Trump's entrada-trail falsehoods are so legion that cataloguing them has become a journalistic pastime. With a cocky disdain for anything every bit boring as prove, the presumptive GOP nominee confidently repeats baseless assertions: He purports to accept watched American Muslims celebrate the Twin Towers' fall; he overstates the sizes of the crowds at his rallies, he understates America's Gdp growth charge per unit, and no reputable business publication agrees with his claims of a personal internet worth of $10 billion. In March, when three Political leader reporters fact-checked Trump'due south statements for a week, they establish he had uttered "roughly 1 misstatement every five minutes." Collectively, his falsehoods won PolitiFact'due south 2015 "Lie of the Year" award. Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks has judged Trump "perhaps the nearly dishonest person to run for high part in our lifetimes."
Clinton isn't an egregious fabricator like Trump, simply she's been indomitable her whole career by a sense of inauthenticity—the perception that she's selling herself as something she isn't, whether that'southward a feminist, a liberal, a moderate or a fighter for the working class. Detractors, peculiarly on the correct, have deemed her dishonest about the facts every bit well. In 1996, New York Times columnist William Safire chosen her a "congenital liar," and decried equally utterly implausible Clinton's statements nigh commodities trading, the firing of White House travel staff and the investigation of Vince Foster's suicide. Although unfounded, his charges stuck. Feeding the image of a prevaricator, Clinton has also waffled on or modified her policy positions over the years on issues ranging from free merchandise to gay marriage. And that doesn't even include the ongoing investigation of the private email server she used during her tenure as secretary of state, and her highly disputed statements near whether and how it conflicted with regime rules.
Every bit Trump and Clinton head into a general election boxing, it's tempting to despair that political lying has reached epic proportions—that the venerable institution of the American presidency is about to be smothered in a blizzard of untruth. But at that place's no need to panic: Lying has a long and distinguished lineage in American presidential politics, and the commonwealth has survived. Equally much as we'd similar to imagine it, there was never a time when our democratic debates adhered to the standards of the courtroom or the lie-detector test. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in a classic 1967 essay, "No one has e'er doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other."
Yet persistence of presidential lying doesn't mean that our politics are morally bankrupt. Yes, republic demands that the people know the truth nearly what their leaders are doing, and what their potential leaders intend. Some lies hibernate information that the public ought to know; others can sow fake or dangerous beliefs. A pattern of premeditated duplicity—or fifty-fifty a cavalier disregard for the facts—tin can bespeak a character ill-suited for autonomous leadership.
Only there are lies and and then there are lies. And we wouldn't exist honest if we didn't acknowledge that sometimes lying—and lying well—is a necessary skill for those at the summit, whether it'due south the kind of official charade that might exist necessary to protect national security or the benignly misleading rhetoric that often accompanies a heated campaign.
So when information technology comes time to vote for Clinton or Trump, what actually matters isn't whether those two candidates lie—because all politicians do—but rather what kind of falsehoods each candidate tells. On that question, history offers a host of possible answers.
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Presidential campaign lying in the The states dates to the primeval days of the democracy. When John Adams squared off against Thomas Jefferson in 1800, they waged a slander state of war by proxy: Adams' men condemned Jefferson as an atheist (he wasn't) and Jefferson's side blasted Adams as a monarchist (he wasn't). This was only the culmination of a simmering battle in which both sides tested the boundaries of the truth. After a note from Jefferson appeared in impress assailing "political heresies" (widely understood to refer to Adams), Jefferson disingenuously professed that he didn't have his rival in listen. Adams, for his part, disavowed having written a series of published letters lambasting Jefferson, neglecting to add that his son, John Quincy, had written them with his father'south blessing.
No campaign since has been devoid of falsehoods—particularly when information technology comes to the candidate's biography and political history. In 1828, Andrew Jackson maintained that he had been previously deprived of the presidency through a "corrupt bargain" between his opponents, though no illicit deal was ever proven. In 1840, William Henry Harrison proclaimed himself the "log cabin" candidate and a man of the common people, when in fact he was built-in to considerable wealth (his borderland dwelling house, however, was indeed made of wood). "Honest Abe" Lincoln, in reality a consummate pol, hedged every bit equally much every bit Hillary Clinton—including on the greatest moral problems in our history: race and slavery. Past the 1880 election, James Garfield was failing to come make clean about a bribe he had taken in the Crédit Mobilier scandal of the Ulysses S. Grant years, while his opponent and successor, Chester Arthur, lied about his age (equally did a later presidential entrant, Gary Hart, in 1984).
In our time, spinning one'south accomplishments and positions into something they were non has get a familiar campaign trope, from Joe Biden'due south 1988 fictions about his law school performance to Ted Cruz's strained claims of unwavering opposition to an immigration compromise. Even ostensibly honest Jimmy Carter, the moralizing Baptist from Georgia who promised the public that he would never lie, served upwards scores of whoppers, every bit the journalist Steven Brill chronicled in a timeless article. Carter called himself a peanut farmer when he actually ran an agribusiness, and claimed to be a nuclear physicist based on his modest graduate piece of work in engineering.
Of form, campaign-trail deceit can practise much more than than just inflate a candidate's reputation—or, if exposed, impairment his or her credibility. In some cases, it can affect the outcome of the election and even the course of geopolitical events. The most famous examples are promises made in bad faith to the voters. In 1940, Franklin D. Roosevelt surprised his speechwriter, Sam Rosenman, by telling a Boston audience, "Your boys are not going to exist sent into any foreign wars." When Rosenman asked why Roosevelt had left out the phrase "except in case of attack," which the candidate normally included, FDR offered, "If we're attacked, information technology's no longer a foreign war." Most voters knew that Roosevelt expected America to take to intervene in Earth State of war 2, but the candidate's amped-up rhetoric blunted the surging candidacy of Roosevelt's more neutralist rival, Wendell Willkie. It was but a matter of fourth dimension before President Roosevelt sent American boys to the battleground.
FDR was far from unique in making campaign promises he didn't intend to keep or that he knew were unrealistic. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson said of Vietnam, "We still seek no wider state of war," fifty-fifty as he was concluding that escalation was necessary. In 1968, Richard Nixon pledged "peace with award," only his storied "secret plan" to end the state of war never materialized. Ronald Reagan vowed to residuum the budget, increase defense spending and cut taxes—but "Reaganomics" exploded the deficit even as it forced him to heighten taxes later on. George H.W. Bush gave us "Read my lips: No new taxes," and Barack Obama promised in 2008 to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.
It's i thing for a candidate to overpromise and underdeliver. And some presidents break promises considering of changed circumstances, slap-up faith—like Lincoln's want in 1860 to maintain the matrimony or Woodrow Wilson'due south promise in 1916 to proceed America out of World War I. But when a president misleads the public from the Oval Office—especially about war and peace—we tend to exist less forgiving. Many of our wars have been justified at the time with some caste of hyperbole, if not outright fabrication. James Polk falsely claimed that the site where Mexican troops had killed Americans during an 1846 border dispute was on U.Southward. soil—precipitating the Mexican-American state of war. Following Deutschland's assault on the U.S.Southward. Greer in the North Atlantic in September 1940, FDR concealed the American vessel'south role in provoking the assail, determined to use the escalation to justify more extensive preparations for American archway to World War II. On Vietnam, Johnson overlooked of import intelligence in hyping the Gulf of Tonkin attacks in 1964. And we all know what happened afterward George Due west. Bush-league overstated the threat posed past Saddam Hussein before invading Iraq in 2003.
We tend to be more tolerant of Oval Office lies that we recall are needed to protect national security. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, John F. Kennedy'south administration, non wanting to reveal the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba, deluded the printing by stating that the president was flying back to Washington because of a head common cold and that naval maneuvers in the Caribbean were existence canceled because of a hurricane. Subsequently the crunch passed, Arthur Sylvester, a Pentagon flack, explained, "Information technology's an inherent regime right, if necessary, to lie to salve itself when information technology's going upwards into a nuclear state of war"—a statement that provoked much handwringing but that many Americans would nonetheless likely endorse.
Amongst the worst kind of presidential lies are politicians' attempts to embrace things up—a ane-two dial of shady behavior and deception nearly information technology. If the lie masks private matters, it may cause no public damage. Lots of presidents and candidates take fibbed about their sexual activity lives, for instance—from Thomas Jefferson to Grover Cleveland, Dwight Eisenhower to Bill Clinton, Gary Hart to John Edwards. Others have withheld the truth nigh their health: Wilson, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Reagan and perhaps almost brazenly Cleveland, who had cancer surgery on a yacht to evade discovery.
Much more concerning is the concealment of breaches of the public trust—the lies about major wrongdoing. When news of the Watergate burglary broke, Nixon famously insisted, "No ane in the White House staff, no ane in this administration, presently employed, was involved in this incident." Thereafter, he lied baldly and repeatedly until forced to release tapes that proved his dishonesty. Reagan'due south presidency hit a nadir when he declared of the scandal that became known as the Iran-Contra thing, "We did not—repeat—did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages." After, when facts proved otherwise, he had to explicate, "My heart and my all-time intentions still tell me that's true, just the facts and the evidence tell me information technology is non." His vice president, George H.Westward. Bush, also lied in saying he didn't know about it.
Many of our wars have been justified at the time with some degree of hyperbole, if not outright fabrication.
These are the lies nosotros remember long later on. What we forget are the more than common—indeed innumerable—acts of garden-diversity spin and dissimulation that loom large in the heat of a campaign or political fight but eventually come to seem unremarkable. At various points in history, reporters, commentators and other observers have made the mistake of failing to distinguish between the 2.
During the Vietnam War, Johnson rightly came under fire for his administration's deceptions nigh the depth of American interest in Vietnam and the prospects for victory. By 1965, reporters were talking nigh a "brownie gap" and viewing Johnson as an arrant fabricator—and justifiably so; those were lies worth calling out.
At one indicate in late 1966, even so, the president was visiting Korea and bragged to an audition near Seoul that his great-cracking-grandfather had died at the Alamo. Merely a couple of papers called into question the throwaway remark, simply it defenseless the involvement of the reporters who had been tussling with LBJ over the war, and they determined that it was bogus. Just a couple years before, such an embellishment would have been met with amused smiles from journalists who relished the charismatic and pop president'due south fondness for a good yarn. Amid the new contentiousness, however, they took the Alamo story as more than proof of Johnson's dangerous dishonesty. But if they were correct to agree LBJ to account for his lies about the war, they too revealed that they had lost the ability to differentiate the lies that mattered from those that didn't.
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Information technology's not that we should let Clinton and Trump spew whatsoever half-truths and untruths they similar. Only history shows us how different ane lie can be from the next. So where do Clinton and Trump actually stack up?
On the whole, Clinton'south misstatements are those of a typical politician. She has changed her position on a number of bug, and some of these reversals—like her newfound opposition to the Pacific trade deal she championed equally secretary of state—ascension to the level of flip-flops or, mayhap, insincere electioneering designed to obscure what she actually thinks. In defending her use of a private email server, Clinton has clearly stretched the truth, though whether she grasps the fallaciousness of her statements or believes herself to be giving directly answers is impossible to know. Her biggest trouble is how she responds to questions nigh her veracity. She invariably defaults to a lawyerly persona—a guarded, defensive and hedging style that inhibits her from explaining herself in the relaxed, "authentic" style voters like to run into. That hyper-defensiveness, the lack of apparent forthrightness, is what gave rise to charges like Safire's ii decades agone and what perpetuates the impression that she doesn't level with the public.
Trump may not be quite the outlier that pundits make him out to be. Nosotros accept seen compulsively dishonest politicians before.
Trump is much more than shameless every bit a trafficker in untruth. He seems willing to say whatever he deems necessary to win back up at the moment, and he tries to become people to accept his statements through the sheer vehemence of his rhetoric. When he says, falsely, that "there'south no real assimilation" amid "second- and third-generation" Muslims in the United states, it conspicuously doesn't affair to Trump whether he's correct; what matters is that he wants us to believe he'south correct. Many of his misstatements, taken individually, may exist fairly innocent or at least commonplace, but the brazenness and frequency of the falsehoods, and their evident expedience, are what set Trump apart. Moreover, his typical response to being chosen out is to double downwards on a falsehood—like denying that he backed the 2003 Iraq invasion and the 2011 Great socialist people's libyan arab jamahiriya intervention—or to pretend he never uttered it, showing an egregious unconcern or contempt for truth that taxes even the generous standards of political soapbox.
Still, even Trump may not be quite the outlier that pundits make him out to be. Every bit history makes articulate, nosotros have seen compulsively dishonest politicians many times before. It'due south hard to fence that Trump outranks Nixon as the most consequential political liar of contempo years. Unlike Trump, Nixon took pride in publicly expressing himself with decorum and formality, but he turned out to lie with a neurotic regularity. He was, in fact, widely seen to be a liar and criticized for information technology—and that did not stop him from winning two terms as president. The debunking began early equally journalists subjected his rhetoric to unsparing exegeses; back in 1960, Meg Greenfield wrote a classic article for the Reporter that picked apart such stray Nixon devices as "The Straw Men," "The Slippery Would-Have-Been" and "The Short Bridge from (a) to (b)" (professing, in a single sentence, to believe both a argument and its opposite). The Watergate tapes proved that tendency beyond question.
If Nixon's lies stemmed from pathology, Ronald Reagan'southward seemed to outcome from a curious disengagement from reality. Although he is remembered today as gentle and genial, Reagan was in his own time viewed as a font of falsehoods, spewed along with either contemptuous intent or shocking indifference to the truth. He declared that trees caused more pollution than cars; that Leonid Brezhnev invented the thought of a nuclear freeze; that the unemployment rate had started rising earlier he took office; that he was nowadays at the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. David Gergen, one of his communication aides, took to calling his most absurdly embellished or fictional stories "parables," trying to make the case that they were understood past their audiences, similar biblical tales, to be metaphorical and instructive, not literal. The press corps wasn't sold. Still, Reagan'due south misstatements didn't hurt him much—an immunity that earned him the nickname "the Teflon president." It was in reaction to Reagan that journalists first started the exercise of fact-checking presidential speeches. When Iran-Contra was exposed, many people charitably wondered whether Reagan just had not known what his underlings were upward to, though bear witness later emerged suggesting he'd been informed. His lies, it turned out, were far more than merely trivial.
Possibly the closest antecedent to Trump is non a president or presidential candidate but a senator: Joe McCarthy, who was similarly daydreaming of the truth as he clamored for media attention. Like Trump, McCarthy fabricated a practice of staying in the spotlight past firing off outrageous statements—in his case, charges, often scurrilous, that some government official or intellectual effigy was a communist or communist sympathizer. The printing gave him the observe he craved as it scrambled to verify his charges, but by the time an assertion was debunked, McCarthy was on to the next. The allegations Trump tends to brand are, of course, unlike, only the method of spouting explosive charges without concern about their accuracy is remarkably similar.
So, is Trump a liar for the history books? From the evidence that's emerged and then far, he does seem to be on the extreme end in his recklessness with the truth, combining Nixon's compulsiveness in lying, McCarthy's pessimism and Reagan's blasé condone for the facts. Nonetheless, a lot of the lies attributed to him—maybe even most—fall within the normal range of political spoken communication, and a review of any list of his lies shows many of them to be simply "gotcha" journalism by commentators who dislike him for other reasons.
If history provides plenty of models for Clinton's dissembling and even some precedent for Trump's dishonesty, why exercise these 2 candidates get such low marks for truthfulness? It's partly because of America's corrosive political civilisation today. Ever since George Westward. Bush went to war in Iraq on what seemed to be a false pretext, journalists take grown more than assertive nigh calling out falsehoods rather than falling back on on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand standards of political reporting. Only, as they did under LBJ, they have also become more than censorious of statements that would once accept been excused as routine fibbing, exaggeration or human inconsistency. At the same time, politics has grown more polarized, rhetoric more heated and the conversation in the media much more partisan. Social media and partisan outlets encourage each side to forge a picture of the other as not only wrong simply dishonest. The seeming prevalence of political lies today may but reflect the fact that we all tend to regard our opponents with more hostility and suspicion than nosotros have in a long time—and are quicker to stamp their rhetoric with the unforgiving characterization of the lie.
Telling the truth matters, even in politics. But we should remember that today, as at other points in our by, charges of lying frequently arise not out of sober concern for the sanctity of our public discourse, only every bit a way to score quick and wounding points in the partisan joust that is American democracy.
Source: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/07/2016-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-us-history-presidents-liars-dishonest-fabulists-214024
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