In this case, yes, it does. Coke isn’t lying or manipulating when they fail to state that their beverage ruins peoples’ teeth. Obama isn’t lying or manipulating when he doesn’t point out that there were millions of jobs lost during the early part of his Administration.
It is outrageously unrealistic to expect that anyone would seek to promote themselves or their product by presenting pro/con arguments, as opposed to the well accepted practice of accentuating one’s positives. I know for certain that the last time I interviewed for a job, I did not say, “I show up to work on time, I work hard, and I’m creative, but sometimes I’m distracted at work during slow times with debates on the Straight Dope Message Board, plus I’m really grouchy in the morning.” Nobody but nobody is expected to “sell” themselves in such a manner as the OP seems to want, and that includes consumer products, politicians, job interviewees, couples who are dating, or anyone else doing virtually anything else.
I’m not excusing blatant lying or fabrications, but if you can’t deal with people presenting things in the most favorable light for their own interests, it’s time to pack up and move out to a Unabomer shack in the woods, because spin is totally part of human nature. Everyone does it. If the common person applies a little spin in their own life, that’s overlooked; if a politician applies spin, he’s a lying liar who lies.
The thing is, we don’t really let it go unchallenged. Media outlets will publish “fact check” articles after the debates, lies get pointed out on Internet forums like this one, etc. What more should we be doing? Refusing to vote for anyone who’s ever distorted the truth to try to get elected? That would pretty much eliminate every politician.
I don’t agree that this is manipulation, unless it has been established that Obama “lost” almost 5.2 million jobs in the first year of his term. Note that that number of jobs being lost in that period of time is not the same thing as Obama losing those jobs.
Yeah, I’m sorry but this outrage is completely misplaced. It is no candidate’s responsibility to point out their pros and cons. If it upsets you that a politician will only point out good things about themselves, you really need to chill out.
People don’t go into a job interview and give the pros and cons of why they should or shouldn’t be hired. An effective ad campaign doesn’t go on about the good and bad points of a product. And candidates should not be held to the standard of having to point out their good and bad qualities.
I don’t think it is so much that Americans are stupid, but that they are lazy. It takes a bit of work to make an informed choice but only a few seconds to hear a soundbite.
This is a feature of the difference between the political systems of the two countries. The UK only recently began to have public debate between candidates for PM because the election isn’t really a contest between those candidates but between parties. The PM is responsible to their party and to the Commons. In the US the president is independent of the legislature and his party and is essentially answerable to no one until his term is over. A call for the president to resign would not only be highly unusual but meaningless. And in the campaign the candidates are each independent and won’t agree to a debate if they think the format won’t be favorable to them. If a moderator promised to stop the debate and call out a candidate any time one of then made a false statement, he’d find he had an empty stage.
Not all voters “put up” with it. 45% or so of people of voting age do not vote. Some just don’t care. I suspect quite a lot don’t want to pick an evil, whether lesser or not.
I don’t know how to quantify “quite a lot” in this statement, but however you do so the percentage of eligible voters who actually vote has not changed significantly for the past 100 years as you can see by this chart.
In fact, the percentage took a sudden dip to modern values in the election of 1912, an election in which there were four major candidates. I would make the case, therefore, that increasing the number of parties reduces voting by sowing more confusion. The other election with four parties was 1948 and that election had the lowest percentage between 1924 and 1980. (Longer if you assume that the 19th amendment artificially lowered percentages until voting became standard for women as well as men.)
I’m sure there are many people who don’t vote because they say they don’t care for the process of politics - whether this is true or merely the excuse they use we’ll never know. My opinion is that the lack of viable national third parties has little or nothing to do with it and never has.
How ironic that your examples of politicians being illogical and inconsistent are themselves, when taken in combination, illogical and inconsistent, insofar as the point raised in the latter (that the events of Obama’s early term reflect the results of the previous administration’s* actions) seriously undercuts the point raised in the former.
*I do not name Obama’s predecessor – apparently (if the careful silence of his old political colleagues is any indication) daring to utter his name will unleash a plague of locusts or darken the sun or otherwise bring doom upon the land.
Well, about 30 years ago the debates were run by an independent organization and the political parties didn’t like having their candidates actually moderated by journalists who kept them relatively honest (regarding their record or what they said), then the parties took over the debates and that journalistic integrity more or less evaporated (apparently across the board and not just in debates).
Instead of that CNN Undecided Voter Graph, I’d like to see the results of candidates being hooked up to a polygraph during the debate.
In addition, they would be hooked up to receive a small shock if they break the rules of the debate, speak over the designated time, or ignore the moderator’s instructions.
The debates are run by the Democrat- and Republican-controlled Commission on Presidential Debates. Hence why the Greens and Libertarians aren’t invited, and why important questions (like “How do you justify prosecuting John Kiriakou for espionage for confirming that the US government was using torture as an interrogation technique, while you continue to refuse to prosecute the torturers themselves?”) are not mentioned.
Polygraphs only measure stress, not lies. Publicly defending your opinions on national, live television where people are going to blow any verbal misstep way out of proportion is going to produce a lot of false positives.
True. But it would still be more interesting than that undecided voter graph, and it might inspire them to tone down the bullshit. The shock feature is a keeper, though.
I disagree with OP. Of course I disapprove of blatant lies, but when there’s ambiguity it’s only natural to express one’s case in a favorable way. Both of the examples are quite true, just misleading. Do you expect a debater to spend part of his two minutes making the opposing case?
(Although I don’t think the specific charges are valid, I do agree that exchanging misleading claims will distract viewers from the truth. But the solution, if any, would arise in print media. Televised debates are about style, not information; heaven help a voter who looks to the debates to learn the facts.)
And THATs the problem with this sound bite debate format.
The Republican primary had about a million hours of debates, the 2008 Democratic debates had a million hours of debate time and I think they were a positive thing.
I wouldn’t mind having 3 or 4 more debates a la Lincoln-Douglass.
There was an article in that ultra-conservative paper, the Huffington Post, that laid the numbers cited in the OP out on Wednesday morning - according to them there’s only been a netgain of a couple hundred thousand jobs since Obama took office. You can probably find the article pretty easily. They also pointed out that the majority of the jobs lost were mid-wage jobs and the majority created low-wage ones.
I don’t really see how this is any more misleading than counting things from the beginning of his term. When he came into office, the economy was hemorrhaging 800,000 jobs per month. Do you think that the President has a magic wand and can instantly stop that? I suppose one could debate when exactly would be a reasonable time to start the accounting, but surely looking only at the “position” but ignoring the “velocity” at the moment he took office is not the correct way to consider things!