Jun 26 2008
Honesty: The Best Policy? (Truthiness in ‘08)
In my previous post, I gave a Michelle Obama quote and said it showed “the completely honest nature of all the Obamas.”
Let me rephrase that.
No politician can ever be completely honest. Jimmy Carter tried to be. In an interview he was asked if he had ever committed adultery. He said, “No, but I have committed adultery in my heart many times”(paraphrased), meaning he had had fantasies about women other than his wife.
How shocking.
This brutal honesty won Carter his first term due to America’s need for honesty after Nixon’s Watergate fiasco.
But that same honesty gave him a huge loss four years later, when America was ready to eat up Ronald Reagan’s “semi-truth,” or “truthiness.”
Reagan’s campaign slogan was, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”
Isn’t that a kind of ridiculous question in the first place? Reaganomics took more than four years to help people anyway, and some would argue that it didn’t help people at all. But America was willing to eat up Reagan’s truthiness…and America will once again be dining on truthiness in ‘08.
Neither McCain nor Obama are 100% honest.
But just look at how the public turned on Jimmy Carter.
(look for the continuation of Truthiness in ‘08 tomorrow!)
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