this bjturk.commentary:
credibility counts

In the 2000 U. S. Presidential race, does what a candidate says really matter? We have become so inured to broken campaign promises and false statements that it is difficult to get a firm grip on what a candidate stands for and whether he will serve the nation well. We have found with our current president that the trust we place in the person for whom we vote is too often misplaced, though it took President Clinton to highlight just how poor our judgment may be. His direct lies in the Lewinsky investigation were an insult to Miss Lewinsky and an affront to the American people.

So what have we got this year? Ralph Nader, for one, who has not always taken the truth seriously himself. He wrote a damning piece about the Chevrolet Corvair, likening it to a deathtrap on wheels, when independent testing ultimately proved that the car was no more dangerous than anything else on the road. Nonetheless, Chevrolet discontinued the model after the inaccurate assertions irresponsibly made by Nader devastated sales. In his case, he seems to cruise on blissful ingorance in his role as a consumer advocate. However, being a consumer advocate requires a semblance of credibility, and it amazes me how he has retained any at all for this long. As a candidate, he was an also-ran from the start, and it is highly unlikely at this late date that he will do anything to change that status.

Vice President Al Gore is the Democrat standard-bearer. While he has been the veep for eight years, we have to ask ourselves if this is the man we want as our president. He has made some of the most outrageous statements over the past few years, many of which are easily proven untrue. He has taken responsibility for creating the Internet, even though its existence dates back to his teenage years. He claimed recently, when accepting the endorsement of the Teamsters union, that his mother used to sing him the Look for the Union Label jingle (from a commercial for the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union) as a lullaby, though the song was not written until Gore was a strapping, college-educated lad of 27. (Either he was lying or he had an inappropriate relationship with his mother, neither of which increase my opinion of him.) Gore also recently made a statement in Florida before a group of senior citizens that his dog and his mother-in-law take the same medicine, but they don't cost the same. As you may have guessed, this was also found to be untrue. During the first debate with George W. Bush, he claimed to have visited Texas during its devastating wildfires with the head of the Federal Emergency Management Administration, and the doubtful look Bush gave him at the debate later proved dead-on: Gore had flown over the area on the way to another destination, but hadn't actually set foot on Texas soil at the time. What does it take to get the truth out of this man?

He seems to be so busy reinventing himself (how about that smooch he planted on Tipper at the convention, eh?) that he has decided to cast himself in the Clinton mold. Gore will never be able to make this work because, frankly, he's no fun. He simply hasn't the personality to pull off the down-home geniality that won the office for Carter, Reagan and Clinton. It won't work, and he looks like a buffoon trying to make it happen. If he was going to do something like this, he should have started four years ago. Now it all looks fake, and the reason that it looks fake is because it is fake. Gore is clearly showing that he will say and do whatever it takes to get elected, and he expects us to be idiots, forget the past and lap it up obediently.

Let us now turn to the Republican candidate, George W. Bush. He was caught with an open mike, calling a reporter for the New York Times a "major-league asshole." While we can debate the propriety of making such a remark, we can hardly doubt that he was being truthful. Bush tends to be refreshingly candid in his delivery, regardless of the audience, and he projects a great deal of credibility. I have not seen him make statements tailored to curry favor with voters either in-person or through sound bites, and he seems to be somewhat bold in expressing how he feels even though it may not be popular or the right place to make such declarations.

In a recent television appearance, the studio audience gasped when he declared that the best man did not win in the election of 1992. Personally, I think he may well be right about that, given what we now know about Clinton's activities. However, I took his statement about the best man not winning in 1992 as a defense of his father, then-President George H. W. Bush, than a slap against the current chief executive (one could make easily a case for both viewpoints being expressed at once). Bush has built a short but significant history of expressing his opinions and feelings in a straightforward fashion. It is this history that he is building that is also building his credibility. Bush seems the least-manufactured candidate that either of the major parties have presented to us in quite some time.

What Americans tend to want in a president is not only a man (or woman) who is consistent with their personal beliefs, but also a man (or woman) who is self-consistent. Sometimes doing the right thing is difficult, and sometimes standing by your beliefs is difficult, but Americans want a president that can and will do both with ease. We want to know what we're getting, and we want to be sure, to the degree that we are able, that the president we elect will act in a manner consistent with his or her prior behavior and beliefs. It has become too difficult to tell what Gore stands for. It seems that he stands for whatever the group before him at the time wants. The story changes too often to trust him from one moment to the next. Bush tells you how he sees it, and whether you agree with him or not, you know that he's not lying to you. The real question this election seems to be whether you want a president who tells you what you want to hear or a president who will tell you the truth even if it hurts.

There's a song, Sometimes When We Touch, that has this line: "I'd rather hurt you honestly than mislead you with a lie." Bush's consistency and credibility tell me that he bears this same sentiment. On the other hand, Gore's platitudes and disrespectful untruths make trusting him impossible. I'd rather be hurt honestly too. I've been misled by lies long enough. Haven't we all? I'm voting for, hoping for, and praying for Bush. And I don't consider him the lesser of two evils.

September 22, 2000
Revised October 9, 2000

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