Can We Vote Already?

I just scanned the news headlines on several sites. The ad infinitum presidential campaign has become ad nauseam. Television and radio are worse. Barack Obama might be progressive, but the Republican campaign ads here in Western Pennsylvania are definitively regressive:

Obama is a socialist … palling around with terrorists … unethical … who will raise taxes on the middle class.

If Sen. Obama responds directly to these accusations, I fully expect the McCain camp to break out in a chorus of I'm rubber, you're glue. Everything you say bounces off of me and sticks to you.

Update, a day late: I'm concerned that regressive Republican tactics might garner Sen. McCain some votes at the cost of widening the polarization of the citizenry. On Wednesday, Glenn Greenwald noted that recent attacks by right-wing politicians have fallen flat, leaving the perpetrators to backtrack or apologize “for insulting liberals or impugning their patriotism."

Greenwald closes on this hopeful note:

We're gradually seeing not only the demise of the right-wing faction that has dominated the Republican Party for decades, but also the death of their ugliest and most toxic tactics. When numerous right-wing figures crawl across one's television set desperately denying and abjectly apologizing for attacks on the patriotism of Democrats and liberals, that is potent evidence that, at least as a matter of political rhetoric, a genuine sea-change is taking place.

Fact-Checking the Candidates

More than 20 years ago, the veteran columnist and author Phil Musick made a timely observation on his radio show. He believed that any politician who would just speak the truth would have a clear advantage with the voters.

Nowadays, "the truth" comes at us from many angles. It can be pre-packaged to reinforce beliefs, values and prejudices. It can be taken in or out of context. It comes at us 24/7. If you see truth that you don't like, you can sample another. Where are the credible journalists? Many of them have been here all the time, hidden in the media glut. Others are finding their way. If fact-based truth matters to you, there's good news.

Samuel Chamberlain, of the newspaper trade journal, Editor & Publisher, has written a special report about how fact-checking became prominent for the current presidential campaign. He quotes Bill Adair, Washington bureau chief of the St. Petersburg Times, about the genesis of Politifact:

We felt that we had done a disservice to voters [in 2000 and 2004] where we were passing along claims about candidates that were not true, and feeling that it was up to the voters to decide, he says. So, about a year ago, my editors came up with the idea of a Web site that would be a sort of daily journal and archive where voters could look things up and see if these claims were true.

Politifact, with it's features, the Truth-O-Meter and the Flip-O-Meter, has a concise purpose:

Each election year we hear this lament from our readers suffering the barrage of campaign rhetoric: “just gimme the truth.”

That’s the mission of PolitiFact. The St. Petersburg Times of Florida and Congressional Quarterly of Washington, D.C. – two of America’s most trusted, independent newsrooms – have created the site to help voters separate fact from falsehood in the 2008 presidential campaign.

Fact-Check Sites Are Not New.

In the 2004 vice-presidential debate, Dick Cheney referenced FactCheck.com, a misnomer for FactCheck.org, a pioneer veracity site. The FactCheck Wire provides "Faster than the Speed of Spin" updates in support of its mission:

We are a nonpartisan, nonprofit, "consumer advocate" for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. We monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews, and news releases. Our goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship, and to increase public knowledge and understanding.

Other sites aiding voters are USA Today's Candidate Match Game, and The Washington Post's The Fact Checker blog.

Phil Musick might not have found a candidate that would just tell us the truth, but politicians that prevaricate in 2008 are being recorded and checked for their misstatements. I hope that voters aren't too cynical to notice.