The Big Lie: New Politics of Mendacity

Never before in this century has a presidential campaign degenerated so thoroughly into charges of mendacity.

President Bush and his aides accuse Democratic rival Bill Clinton of lying about his efforts to avoid the draft and his role in demonstrations against the Vietnam War.

Clinton and his campaign charge Bush with lying about the President’s role in the Iran-Contra affair and his Administration’s aid to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Voters don’t like it, and, not surprisingly, they give both major-party candidates low scores for honesty. A Times Poll earlier this month found that only 59% believe Bush has the integrity needed in a President; only 55% believe Clinton has the honesty needed in the job.

“People are disgusted with politics as usual,” said CNN political analyst William Schneider. “It is more acute than ever before.”

“I’m old enough to think that every campaign is the worst I’ve ever seen,” said historian Stephen Ambrose. “But I can’t think of a campaign where the character issue took over the way it has in this one. The brazenness of this campaign is startling.”

When the candidates debated before 209 undecided voters in Richmond, Va., Thursday, the citizens demanded that the mudslinging stop--and it did, for 90 minutes.

But no sooner was the debate over than the sparring resumed. Bush turned up the heat while campaigning in New Jersey Friday, accusing Clinton repeatedly of “a pattern of deception”--the euphemism his aides settled on after deciding that the President should stop short of using the word “lie.”

The two candidates have defended their hard-hitting tactics.

“You can call it mud wrestling, but I think it’s fair to put it in focus,” President Bush said during Thursday’s debate. Even Clinton, who said he was “sick . . . (of) having to wake up and figure out how to defend myself every day,” contended that his charges about Bush’s record have been just “fact-slinging,” not mudslinging.

Only independent candidate Ross Perot has managed to stay above the fray--aided, no doubt, by his rivals’ forbearance from attacks on him.

Candidates’ character and credibility have been legitimate issues ever since one of Thomas Jefferson’s opponents lambasted him as a libertine and an atheist. In the 1884 campaign, Republicans publicized Democratic candidate Grover Cleveland’s fathering of a child out of wedlock; Democrats accused the GOP candidate, Sen. James G. Blaine, of lying about a railroad scandal. (Cleveland won.)

But this campaign rivals 1884 for sheer meanness and could take the trophy for the worst in the 20th Century, historians say.

“Even (Richard M.) Nixon’s campaigns were better than this,” said Ambrose, author of a biography of the 37th President, a politician known as a bare-knuckled campaigner. “In 1960, Nixon knew about John F. Kennedy’s affairs with women and his Addison’s disease (an illness caused by failure of the adrenal gland), but he didn’t use them in the campaign.”

Character issues have taken center stage in much of the campaign largely because Bush, battling the handicap of a sour economy, decided to make “trust” his main line of attack against Clinton.

“Who has the perseverance, the character, the integrity, the maturity, to get the job done?” Bush asked in Thursday’s debate, framing the question in its most statesmanlike form.

“The policy part of this campaign is over,” a White House aide said bluntly last week. “What people are looking at now is character, a sense of the person they’re going to elect.”

But Clinton has counterattacked effectively, accusing Bush of being unfair and of trying to conceal parts of his own record as vice president and President.

The result may well be that the honesty issue ends in a tie, depriving Bush of an advantage he was counting on.

Even worse for Bush, his most recent attacks--charging Clinton with leading anti-war demonstrations as a student in England--may have backfired, bringing the President’s own character into question. “The strongest thing this President has is his decency; when he begins to spend that, he doesn’t have much left,” said GOP consultant Doug Bailey, publisher of The Hotline, a political newsletter.

Even before Bush’s latest offensive, the credibility issue cut both ways. A CBS/New York Times poll found that while 33% of voters believed Clinton was not telling the truth about his draft record, a whopping 63% believed Bush was “hiding something” in the Iran-Contra affair.

As a result, most voters appear to be making their choice on the basis of economic policy and other issues, and leaving the character issue out of it.

“Confidence is low in both candidates,” says Schneider. “If people vote for Clinton, it is because they want change.”

The character issue might have worked for Bush if the President had succeeded in communicating an economic agenda, Bailey said.

Instead, Bush has “tried out everything” as a campaign theme, he said. “What comes through out of that is a President who doesn’t believe much of anything, and therefore there are questions about his honesty.”

In that sense, Bush’s decision in 1990 to break his “no new taxes” pledge made the President every bit as vulnerable as Clinton on the honesty issue, he said.

Some scholars worry that such a nasty campaign could poison the entire political system by deepening cynicism about government and squandering opportunities to debate key issues facing the country.

“People have become intolerant (of politicians), the way you can get too much poison ivy,” says Sissela Bok, an ethicist, philosopher and author of the book “Lying.” “People are seeing more lies than there really are.”

Confidence is harder to rebuild than to destroy, she warns. “Once you’ve lost confidence in a person, it’s very difficult to regain it. It’s like a child losing confidence in an adult.”

Complained Ambrose: “What bothers me about this campaign is that it’s a new world out there, and these guys aren’t talking about it. I wish ‘em all bad luck.”

Here are the main character accusations Bush and Clinton have made against each other, and their rebuttals:

The draft: Bush has charged that Clinton schemed to avoid military service during the Vietnam War and then gave varying accounts of his conduct. Clinton has indeed told differing accounts, pleading a faulty memory. Initially, in 1991, he said he was exposed to the draft but was never called up. “It was just a pure fluke,” he said. He has since been embarrassed by successive discoveries that local officials lobbied his draft board on his behalf and that he did receive an induction notice, but it was canceled.

Clinton has acknowledged that he may have pleaded his case with local officials but insisted that he received no special treatment.

He clearly got special consideration from his draft board, but officials have said that was not unusual in those days. The Selective Service System openly allowed draft boards to exempt promising young men like Clinton, a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University, from immediate call-up.

As part of the arrangement to cancel his induction, Clinton signed up for the Reserve Officer Training Corps at the University of Arkansas, which exempted him from any later call-up. But some two months later, before he actually entered training, he said he dropped his ROTC deferment--because, he said, he decided it was wrong to be exempt when other young men were dying. By the time he was reclassified 1-A, however, draft call-ups had been suspended for the year. One month later, the draft shifted to a lottery, and Clinton drew a number so high it was soon clear he would not have to serve.

Two days after the lottery, he wrote a letter to his ROTC commander, Col. Eugene J. Holmes, thanking him “for saving me from the draft.”

Patriotism: Bush has charged Clinton with improper acts in his student days by demonstrating against the Vietnam War in London. “It is wrong to demonstrate against your country when your country’s at war,” the President said on Friday. Bush claimed that he did not mean to question Clinton’s patriotism, however. Bush and his aides also questioned whether it was proper for Clinton to visit Moscow as a tourist in his student days. Deputy campaign manager Mary Matalin accused him of “traveling to the heart of enemy territory at the height of the war.” She too claimed she wasn’t questioning his patriotism.

Clinton has long acknowledged that he participated in demonstrations against the war and said he did not consider that unpatriotic. He has also long acknowledged visiting Moscow, like many of his fellow Rhodes scholars at Oxford. He said the trip was simple tourism.

Clinton supporters have accused Bush and his camp of “McCarthyism”--leveling poisonous charges of disloyalty without evidence, like the late Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis.), who was censured by the Senate in 1954. Some Republicans have agreed that Bush’s charges were unwarranted.

Matalin and other Bush aides have charged that Clinton has given varying accounts of the extent of his participation in the anti-war movement. In his 1969 letter to Col. Holmes, Clinton wrote that he had been organizing demonstrations. But Clinton and other participants in the demonstrations, including one of his most bitter opponents now, all say his role was considerably more limited.

Iran-Contra: Clinton has charged that Bush has failed to give a truthful account of his role in the Iran-Contra scandal, in which the Reagan Administration secretly sold weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages in Lebanon, and the arms sale profits were diverted to aid Nicaraguan rebels.

Bush, who was vice president at the time, has said that he did not know the details of the arms deals and did not realize that the United States was trading weapons for hostages. But several other officials who were involved said Bush was repeatedly briefed about the secret arms sales and actively supported the plan. In recent weeks additional evidence has surfaced that conflicts with Bush’s denials. Howard R. Teicher, a former official at the National Security Council, has said that Bush not only knew the details of the plan but actively “offered his help” to keep the arms sales going at a time when other officials were seeking to halt the deal.

Bush has also said he never realized that then-Secretary of State George P. Shultz and then-Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger were opposed to the arms sales. Shultz and Weinberger have said that they expressed their objections vigorously in at least two meetings attended by the vice president, and other officials have said it is difficult to imagine that Bush was not aware of their positions.

During this year’s campaign, Bush has refused to respond in detail to any of the renewed charges about his role in the affair. “I believe I’ve leveled with the American people, and I have nothing to add to it,” he said.

Iraq: Clinton has demanded the appointment of an independent counsel to investigate whether Bush and his aides have been improperly covering up their dealings with Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein before Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Clinton’s running mate, Sen. Al Gore (D-Tenn.), has charged that Bush’s conciliatory stance toward Iraq led directly to the war.

Bush has defended his actions as a reasonable attempt to bring Hussein into the “family of nations” and denied that U.S. aid helped Iraq’s military.

However, the President’s defense is encountering increasing difficulty as hundreds of pages of policy documents from his Administration surface. The records show that Bush, then-Secretary of State James A. Baker III and other senior advisers offered economic and diplomatic incentives to Iraq even though they were receiving warnings from U.S. intelligence agencies that Hussein was abusing the aid, using U.S. technology to produce weapons and sheltering terrorists.

The Commerce Department altered documents to delete evidence that it had approved exports of military equipment to Iraq. The Central Intelligence Agency concealed critical evidence in a criminal case involving $5 billion in improper loans to Iraq, although federal prosecutors requested the information to provide to the judge.

Bush has angrily rejected calls for a special prosecutor. “There wasn’t anything illegal,” he said.

Nevertheless, late last week U.S. Atty. Gen. William P. Barr named a special prosecutor within the Justice Department to investigate the Administration’s handling of the bank fraud case.