Intellectual honesty can be hard to come by in political arena

By Dan Walters. Sacramento Bee, May 24, 2005

Stripped to its essentials, politics is the art of persuasion; those who promote or oppose political candidates, ballot measures or legislative bills use precisely the same tools as those who market laundry soap or other consumer goods.

There are, however, two striking ways in which political persuasion differs from the commercial variety. State and federal laws impose some limits - imperfect, perhaps - on outright lying in commercial advertising, but there are no such checks on political speech, which is protected by the Bill of Rights. And it's rare these days to find commercial ads that disparage rival products, whereas negative advertising is a staple of politics.

Because political campaigns are single-purpose endeavors - the goal is to win, period - one does not expect to find nuanced arguments in political communications. It falls to the political media, therefore, to enforce a reasonable level of intellectual honesty.

Increasingly, for example, newspapers are dissecting political commercials and not only reporting on the truth or falsity of their assertions, but placing them in context, indirectly compelling political campaigns to back up their TV claims with hard fact.

It's more difficult to enforce intellectual honesty, or even consistency, in the broader array of political speech because it exists in the realm of the immediate. Politicians and their advisers want to score points on one thing on one day; they talk about "message discipline" and "winning the day" and measure their progress in overnight "tracking polls."

An example of that syndrome was the conflict-of-the-moment in Washington - settled on Monday - about whether the majority Republicans would modify or eliminate the filibuster that Democrats have employed to block confirmation of several of President Bush's judicial appointees.

Liberal politicians, advocacy groups and editorial writers who now portray the filibuster as a cherished bulwark for minority rights used to decry it as anti-democratic obstructionism when Southern segregationists used it to thwart civil rights laws. By the same token, born-again Republican champions of majority rule used to see the filibuster's indirect requirement for a 60-vote margin as their leverage.

That was then, this is now.

Bringing the point closer to home, California cousins of Washington liberals often bemoan that it takes a two-thirds legislative vote to pass a budget or tax bill, and even sponsored an unsuccessful ballot measure last year to lower it - while California Republicans see the two-thirds vote as leverage. Logically, a supermajority legislative vote is either anti-democratic or not, but in politics, it depends on the situation.

Another California example: Democratic legislators who voted to tighten workers' compensation benefits are now disavowing those actions, but are also demanding that workers' comp insurance premiums paid by employers be reduced faster because of those money-saving benefit cuts.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger committed a bit of intellectual dishonesty over the weekend when he touted his proposal that $1.3 billion in sales taxes on fuel be spent on transportation projects, as voters decreed in a 2002 ballot measure. The measure allowed the state to retain the money in the general fund if budget conditions required. Citing the 2002 vote, Schwarzenegger told radio listeners that "the politicians had other ideas. They took the money away from transportation." What the governor left out is that he proposed and implemented a full fuel sales tax diversion, more than $1.2 billion, into the general fund in 2004-05.

Spokesman Vince Sollitto doesn't deny those undeniable facts but insists that the governor was not being dishonest, contending that Schwarzenegger was compelled, against his preferences, to seek the diversion last year "to deal with the $22 billion debt he inherited when he came in."

The 2004-05 diversion was justified by the state's chronic deficits, and Schwarzenegger's decision to skip the diversion in 2005-06 and allow the money to flow into transportation is equally justified by the state's improved finances. Schwarzenegger doesn't need to mislead Californians about it. His intellectual dishonesty on this issue undermines his credibility on others.

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