Quote of the Day: Rachel Maddow on truth in politics

By Richard K. Barry 

There's also an interesting conversation to be had about how much you can get away with and still be considered a viable candidate for president. Are we so inured to the idea of everybody calling each other a liar, that when somebody actually really does blatantly lie it doesn't matter anymore? Ultimately, that is not a question about these guys fighting it. That is a question about us.

- Rachel Maddow -

It would appear the Romney campaign is hoping Americans simply won't care about lies told in the heat of a campaign. But, more to the point, Romney is betting that Americans won't do the work necessary to distinguish between campaign rhetoric and things that can be proven wrong. He is hoping voters will roll it into one big ball.

There is a difference between candidates characterizing each other in unflattering ways and candidates simply saying things that are factually untrue. They may be related, but they are not the same thing. To the extent that we accept evidence as significant in determining what is true and what is not true, Mitt Romney's campaign has a record of lying about all sorts of things. Yes, as voters we may tune out when, for example, Romney says Obama wants to punish success in America. After all, how would you definitively prove or disprove something like that? But when Romney actually misquotes Barack Obama to say that Obama believes business people are in no way responsible for their own success, that's a lie, and provable as such.

If Romney wants to say Barack Obama doesn't know what it takes to make a business work or create jobs, that's campaign rhetoric. If he says Obama intends to raise taxes on small business, that is a statement contrary to fact, a lie.

It's one thing to say that President Obama is all about big government, which is campaign rhetoric. It's something else for him to say that Obama has doubled the deficit, which is untrue.

Steve Benen has been cataloging a number of instances in which Romney has lied about Obama's record, not simply characterized it in an unflattering light.

It's easy to tune out campaign rhetoric or simply consider it as the way candidates talk. But we make a mistake if we ignore things candidates say that are demonstrably untrue. Romney is hoping voters won't do the hard work to distinguish between those things that cannot be proven wrong and those things that can. He may be right.

In this sense, Maddow is right. This is about us. 

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)