A Sincere Distrust of Politicians

The relationship is so dysfunctional you expect it to show up on some television slugfest: politicians and the people who distrust them. Typical are the answers--angry exhales, really--to two simple questions posed to an 80-year-old Navy veteran outside a suburban home store.

What do you think of Al Gore?

“Aaaaaaaach,” said the man--who wanted to be known only by his first name, Robbie. “Worse than Clinton. First-class liars. They’ll tell you anything.”

And George W. Bush?

“Aaaaaaaach,” he added, his words jarring the peace of a spring morning in Lakewood. “Same thing.”

It is one of the strange ironies of politics: Candidates expound on issues and people assume they are angling for votes. Politicians try harder, only to have people believe them less--even when they are speaking from the heart. Rarely does a candidate emerge with that trait that neither charm nor money can buy: the assumption that one wholly means what one says.

To hear the campaigns talk, the presidential contest this year pits a Democrat who will say anything to become president and a Republican who will do anything to become president.

Democrats argue that Texas Gov. Bush is not really a self-styled “compassionate conservative” but a ruthless campaigner who sacrificed truth during his primary campaign. Republicans argue that Vice President Gore will take credit for anything and blame for nothing, his words chosen as casually as meals from a menu.

Voters, faced with the impossible task of seeing into a candidate’s heart, get to sort it out. It leaves in despair people who worry about old-fashioned virtues like honesty.

“Today, what a politician has said is more a statement of positioning than a representation of fact,” said Michael Josephson, who runs the Marina del Rey-based Josephson Institute of Ethics. It creates, he added, “a very distorted notion of what it is to be credible and honest.”

No one argues that a politician behaves much differently than any other high-wire occupant. But the stakes are higher, for words are a politician’s currency. The microscopic, public dissection of them can make or break one’s credibility.

“It’s like flirting,” said New York-based Republican political consultant Nelson Warfield. “Some is expected, but too much kills your reputation.”

Analysts differ on whether the current political ranks are less credible than generations before or whether, because of the ever-present media, the contradictions are simply more difficult to ignore.

President Nixon lied about Watergate. President Johnson whitewashed Vietnam. Analysts still cite those events as the defining disillusionments for modern voters. As damaging to the national psyche as those episodes were, the sheer accumulation in recent years--of either lies or credibility-shattering course changes--is boggling.

Ronald Reagan vowed not to trade arms for hostages and then admitted the Iran-Contra affair was just that. George Bush won the presidency in part on his daily vow to suffer “no new taxes,” then, changing his tune, agreed to boost them.

It’s not just a federal conceit: Witness the current brouhaha over California Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush, who argued that he didn’t know about a $500,000 donation arranged by a foundation run by his underlings--then was seen on videotape taking credit for it.

Those incidents pale, of course, to the record of President Clinton. He denied a sexual relationship with Gennifer Flowers, then belatedly admitted it. He said he did not have sex with “that woman,” Monica S. Lewinsky, though her blue dress begged to differ. His comments about not inhaling or dodging the draft, of making promises he later abandoned, fueled years of parody.

Across the board, politicians are widely perceived as untrustworthy, according to an annual Gallup Poll. When asked to compare occupations on a scale of honesty--from very high to very low--respondents ranked most politicians in the bottom half of 45 professions.

For the survey, Gallup divided politicians into several groups: local officeholders, senators, governors or members of Congress. The latter came off the worst--only 1% of those surveyed rated the members “very high” when it came to honesty, and only 10% said they were “high.”

To put it more starkly, members of Congress ranked only a hair’s breadth better than HMO managers or car salesmen. (Nurses, in contrast, were cited as highly honest by 73%.)

Among politicians, the best grade went to local officeholders, yet only 20% of respondents placed them high on the honesty scale. The numbers have fluctuated since the first measurement in 1977, with senators and members of Congress worsening recently, while local politicians improved slightly.

Gallup editor in chief Frank Newport cautioned that voters always tend to be more critical of generic occupations--like those measured in the survey--than specific individuals. But he noted that trustworthiness is clearly an issue this year.

To a large extent, that has come at the expense of Gore. While trying to sidestep the ethical troubles of President Clinton, Gore has often tripped over his own feet.

There were his various expositions on the fate of little Elian Gonzalez: Should his father’s wishes be granted or should his Miami relatives be allowed to fight in the more sympathetic Florida state courts? While much of the time advocating the latter, Gore also gave a nationally broadcast interview suggesting he favored the former.

There was his denunciation of Bush’s plan to let Social Security money be invested in the stock market--a criticism contradicted in part by a videotape of Gore earlier espousing much the same thing.

The most stunning moment may have come when Gore challenged Bush to a truce in raising “soft money”--at almost the same time his team launched an effort to raise $35 million in those unrestricted donations to benefit his candidacy. This, after his involvement in the Democratic team’s questionable moneymaking operation for the 1996 election, which included Gore’s famous fund-raiser at a Buddhist temple in Hacienda Heights.

“It’s sort of like Al Capone giving a seminar on bank security,” said a disgusted Charles Lewis, head of Washington’s Center for Public Integrity. “He has no moral standing to do that.”

Not that Gore is alone. Bush regularly promised Americans that he would give them “a campaign that’s hopeful and optimistic and positive and inclusive.” Then he blistered GOP opponent John McCain across South Carolina and New York. He ran ads accusing the senator from Arizona of opposing federal research on breast cancer--although Bush was quoted at the time as saying even he did not believe the ads.

McCain himself was not immune. During fierce campaigning in Michigan this year, he denied knowledge of his campaign’s efforts to scare Catholic voters away from Bush, only to admit later that he did know about it.

He also pointedly declined to take a stand on the dispute over whether South Carolina should fly the Confederate flag atop its Capitol. Like Bush, McCain argued that the matter should be resolved by the state.

After the campaign, however, McCain returned to South Carolina to admit he had pulled his punch on the issue because he feared that he would lose the primary if he argued for the flag’s removal.

“I broke my promise to always tell the truth,” confessed McCain, who had lost the primary anyway.

Such bluntness is rare. Even when politicians make amends for perceived slights, ethicists and analysts point out, they usually work their way around an outright apology.

Take Bush, when he sought to calm the concerns of Roman Catholic voters weeks after his primary campaign visit to South Carolina’s Bob Jones University, whose founder had insulted Catholicism as a cult and had banned interracial dating.

“On reflection, I should have been more clear in disassociating myself from anti-Catholic sentiments and racial prejudice,” said Bush in a message that went out just before the vote in Catholic-rich New York. “It was a missed opportunity, causing needless offense, which I deeply regret.”

Nowhere in the mea culpa did Bush call the visit a mistake, nor did he criticize the school or its founder.

In defense of the candidates, backers point out that they operate in a 24-hour news vortex where every slip of the tongue, inexact word or misimpression can boomerang around the globe before breakfast.

“To be successful, most times you do have to parse your words,” said David Doak, a Democratic political consultant. That is often the only way, he added, to placate the warring interest groups that one needs in order to assemble a winning coalition.

For a Democrat trying to win Republican votes--or vice versa--it can also come in handy to telegraph a flexible respect for differing views. In 1996, for example, President Clinton warred with Republican nominee Bob Dole; two months after Clinton won the election, he presented Dole with the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Was it hypocrisy or a graceful tribute for a lifetime of public service?

Proving sincerity to people already predisposed not to believe you can be daunting. How to do it?

“Only talk about a few issues, and therefore you look consistent,” advised Anthony Pratkanis, a UC Santa Cruz professor who specializes in social influence and persuasion.

Although a presidential candidate must address a host of issues, both major party nominees this year are generally following that advice. Both have focused most often on education. But Bush campaign strategist Karl Rove said that repetition is not enough--voters must also sense the importance a candidate places on an issue.

“More important is passion,” he said, adding that voters “are cynical, but they are willing to give you the benefit of the doubt.”

Both candidates point to their backgrounds--Bush uses his actions as governor and Gore his record in Congress and as vice president--as evidence of what they would do.

Each also points out his divergence from popular opinion as evidence that he follows his own heart, not his polling data.

Bush says his views on abortion rights and gun control, which are generally more conservative than those of the voting public, show that he hews to his own ideological compass. And when Gore’s support of the Miami relatives of Elian Gonzalez fell flat among most Americans, the vice president argued that that proved his independence. Recently, he defended his support of normal trade relations with China before an angry labor convention--an into-the-lion’s-den gesture that Gore aides hoped would demonstrate his convictions to a broader audience.

In the end, ethicists and political analysts say, voters get what they deserve. Voters say they want honesty, but woe to the candidate who comes out against the death penalty or who backs a tax hike. Voters also decry negative campaigns but often reward the negative campaigner.

Consultant Doak pointed to McCain, who was lauded as a blunt speaker but washed up nonetheless.

“Everybody wants someone who’s a straight shooter and tells the truth. And most of them end up where John McCain is.”