Politics And Lies: No Price To Pay?   

For the press, the challenge is tough and tricky.

The 1992 campaign has hurled the country into deeper cynicism about politics and government. There are parallels with the Vietnam War, when the Johnson and Nixon administrations played upon people's best instincts and readiness to believe words of authority, only to leave them cynical about authority because of the systematic lying.

In both cases the press has been dragged along, more by the undertow than by its own culpability. To many people it seems an accomplice rather than a truth-tracker. Truth-tracking looks adversarial.

"Who do you trust in this election?" George Bush said in August. "The candidate who's raised taxes one time and regrets it? Or the other candidate, who raised taxes and fees 128 times and enjoyed it every time?"

The press has not always been quick to examine political humbuggery, but it plunged into this example with theological thoroughness. Yet the Bush people continued to use the 128-1 score because they thought it worked. Never mind that it wasn't true. It conveyed the truth as they wished it to be: Bill Clinton would raise taxes and George Bush wouldn't.

A theme. It carried a theme. So what if it was a fictionalized, colorized theme.

Several thresholds have been crossed here. It is one thing when the president lies and everybody knows he did. It's another when he goes on doing it. And it's another when he knows they know and he still goes on doing it.

Routine lying proceeds this year with warp speed and smug arrogance. For the press, the challenge is tough and tricky. It calls for distinctions that journalists do not want to make. They, too, are inclined to think "they're all alike," and this is more comfortable than searching for gradations of gray.

My '92 nominee for the Order of Gray Gradations is Michael Kelly of the New York Times, who wrote this second paragraph about a Clinton charge that Bush's policies would devastate the middle class and gut Social Security to pay for tax cuts:

"The accusation was not based on any known plans by the Bush administration, but rather on an edifice of inductive and political reasoning: a series of mathematical assumptions worked out by the Democratic presidential nominee's advisers, based in turn on Mr. Bush's promise to cut taxes while also achieving a savings in federal spending."

Struggling with the grays can be sublime.

Outright lying, which goes beyond gradations of gray, is harder to handle. This campaign has had an extraordinary amount of it.

Campaign misrepresentations are nothing new; they may even be inevitable. Putting a twist or a spin on the facts, or using them selectively to deceive: These are commonplace in politics. So is constructing a view from bits and pieces and attributing it to the other side, which may or may not be fair.

But are there any boundaries? Yes. To say there are no rules except what works is to go along with campaign slickers like the ones George Will called "a riffraff of liars." The standards are vague and often disputable. Still, standards should not be rooted out by liars.

They may have gone too far with their contempt for the public: their belief that ordinary people will not catch on, or that it won't matter if they do. This campaign could change future ones for the better if the lies are kept in the spotlight, and if people see them for what they are. l