Clinton and the Problem of Intellectual Dishonesty

There's a Michael Kinsley piece from the New York Times book review section before the 2006 election where he said:

"The biggest flaw in our democracy is, as I say, the enormous tolerance for intellectual dishonesty. Politicians are held to account for outright lies, but there seems to be no sanction against saying things you obviously don’t believe. There is no reward for logical consistency, and no punishment for changing your story depending on the circumstances. Yet one minor exercise in disingenuousness can easily have a greater impact on an election than any number of crooked voting machines. And it seems to me, though I can’t prove it, that this problem is getting worse and worse."

I have to say I've been extremely disappointed with the Clinton campaign because I think it exemplifies what Kinsley is talking about. She wanted superdelegates to wait before committing when Obama took the delegate lead and they became her sole path to the nomination, yet she had no problems with nearly a hundred committing to her before the primary voting had barely gotten underway. Her campaign seemed happy to support sanctions on Michigan and Florida until it became clear she might need their votes. After the Pennsylvania primary, she counted Michigan to give herself the "popular vote" lead even though that vote gave zero to Obama, a result which cannot possibly be considered to represent the will of eligible Michigan voters (never mind the threshold question as to why the popular vote should be relevant in what is essentially a delegate contest). Her fundraising appeals going into Pennsylvania stated that the campaign should be decided on their ideas and not the size of their campaign coffers, yet she outspent her Republican opponent for Senate in 2006 by over 7:1. She ridiculed Obama for saying that McCain would be an improvement over Bush, even though I can't believe she would vote for Bush over McCain if forced to make the choice. And, as noted in my previous post, she extrapolates primary results to the general election, even though those inferences are logically unwarranted--and I find it hard to believe she doesn't know it.

I think each of those examples are fairly brazen displays of intellectual dishonesty. And I find it hard to find similar examples from the Obama campaign. One can accuse him of not being sufficiently specific, but at least he hasn't put forward an argument I can find that has been deliberately deceptive or specious. And that, I find, is extremely refreshing.

(OK, maybe there's one: he accused Clinton of taking money out of the highway trust fund with her gas tax holiday proposal, when her plan would have oil companies pay the tax. But it's at least no worse a representation than Clinton's claim that the gas tax holiday would bring down gas prices. Any college freshman who has taken Microeconomics 101 would know that if supply can't be increased, the price is going to stay pretty much where it is for the given demand. And Clinton, who prides herself on being the policy wonk, must know it--especially after she failed to name a single economist who supported the idea when asked by George Stephanopoulis on last Sunday's "This Week.")