Making Facts Matter

So much for the prospect of an election based on real issues. With Obama and McCain as our major presidential candidates, some pundits expressed hope in the possibility of a high-minded campaign that really engaged on the issues instead of devolving into insinuation, insidious name-calling, and unsubstantiated innuendo.

Recent events seem to show that we're in for another three months of mudslinging. The McCain campaign has run ads accusing Obama of ignoring hospitalized troops in Germany because he couldn't bring cameras into the facility. This accusation has been shown to be false, and was only reluctantly admitted to by the campaign (which blamed the press for being unclear about the matter instead of doing any fact-checking on its own). The McCain campaign has run ads blaming Obama for high gasoline prices, as if a very weak dollar, an absence of any energy policy for the past decade, and a vehicle fleet that uses the stuff at far higher per-mile rates than Europeans do had nothing to do with the price at the pump--and never mind that Obama has been in federal office for less than four years and is only one of 535 legislators.

McCain has accused Obama of wanting to raise "your" taxes, even though Obama has proposed raising income and Social Security taxes only on the "you" who make above $250,000. And McCain and his surrogates repeatedly argue that raising taxes would kill off economic growth, despite the clear example of the early 1990s that the slightly higher income tax rates and substantially higher capital gains tax rates during the Clinton administration were no serious impediment to substantial and uninterrupted growth, even pre-tech bubble.

Most serious, in my opinion, is the McCain campaign's repeated call for drilling as a solution to high gas prices. Can McCain really think that drilling for oil that won't come onto the market for seven years will have any significant impact on prices today, especially when many analysts say it won't even have a significant impact when it does come onto the market? Never mind the adverse affects that our continued oil use has on our economy, our foreign policy, and the environment.

McCain says he'll balance the budget, but his numbers don't come close to adding up since he doesn't cite budget cuts to offset his tax cuts.

Oh, and the latest: McCain ads criticizing Obama for being popular, comparing him to Brittney Spears and Paris Hilton. The ads as: Is Obama ready to lead? Of course, they provide no facts to explain why he wouldn't be able to lead, or why McCain would be a better leader. They are innuendo without content.

Though the Obama campaign has responded, I'd like to see a harder-hitting answer that goes after McCain's credibility and moves the discussion back to the issues. When McCain says Obama is going to raise the taxes of most Americans, it's simply not the truth. When McCain says Obama's modest and targeted tax hikes will hurt the economy, it's just not necessarily the case. When he says Obama has caused our oil problem and drilling is the answer to high gas prices, he's just wrong on the facts. When McCain says he'll balance the budget despite his hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts, he should be forced to tell us what spending cuts he'd propose to achieve that goal. (Obama should have to defend his budget numbers as well, though at least he doesn't pretend to balance the budget and says instead that certain spending programs are worth running up more debt.)

If facts don't matter, we shouldn't bother with elections. But we can make the case that the past seven years of ignoring the facts has led to our present problems. It's time to make facts matter again.