Ordinary Lies, Damn Lies and the Debates

Consumer warning: The claims you hear in Wednesday night’s presidential debate may be hazardous, if not to your health, then to your relationship to reality.

In a campaign that features some of the most dishonest television ads in history, President Obama and Mitt Romney have been more circumspect about what comes out of their mouths than what is shown before or after they identify themselves and say “and I approve this message.” But they will be tempted to use the themes their pollsters have found effective. That may be especially true for Romney, knowing that he is trailing. A huge television audience provides what is perhaps his last best chance to change things.

Even if they restrain themselves and don’t parrot their most thoroughly debunked ads, those themes will come up. Romney may not repeat his ad’s false charge about welfare that “Under Obama’s plan, you wouldn’t have to work and wouldn’t have to train for a job. They just send you your welfare check.” If welfare comes up at all, Obama or the moderator, Jim Lehrer, is likely to cite that ad against Romney, and his practice has been to defend his worst ads when challenged.

That is Obama’s way, too, with a rare exception. Last week, speaking to the AARP, he played fact-checker to his own campaign. He conceded that its ad (and his own words), claiming that Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan would force seniors to pay $6,400 extra, was outdated because Mr. Ryan has modified it since last year. Of course Obama did not go as far as to say that the Romney-Ryan campaign now says future seniors could still get traditional Medicare at no additional cost.

These and other claims, offering far more precision about what the other guy would do wrong than specifics about a candidate’s own plans are likely to fill Wednesday’s air. Last week three of this campaign’s most authoritative fact-checkers – Jim Drinkard of the Associated Press, Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post and Bill Adair of The Tampa Bay Times’s PolitiFact.com – gathered at the National Press Club in Washington to forecast how the candidates would try to mislead us Wednesday.

Drinkard said he thought Obama would say that he could finance domestic programs with savings from ending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – a claim he made in this year’s State of the Union address and his acceptance speech. The flaw, Drinkard pointed out, is that ending wars does not leave a pile of money, just a slightly smaller increase in debt going forward.

Romney, he said, would probably use some variation of his debunked claim that Obama has been apologizing for America abroad. Obama, like his predecessors, has said the United States had made mistakes, Drinkard noted. And contrary to Romney’s most recent claims, no statement from Obama or his administration offered any sympathy to the men who attacked and killed the American ambassador and three other diplomats in Benghazi.

Kessler expected to hear Obama recycle the $6,400 cost claim on Medicare. Romney, he said, was likely to renew his assertion that Obama cut $700 billion from Medicare. That “cut” is a hoped-for reduction in the future growth of the program. When Republicans like Newt Gingrich were proposing to curb the growth of entitlements in the ’90s, they insisted those were not “cuts.”

Adair thought Romney would make the welfare argument and Obama would call his opponent a threat to Medicare.

Accuracy hardly figures in the expectations of the impact of the debate. It is instead widely seen as a chance for Romney, the challenger, to stand up next to an incumbent president and show himself as “presidential,” like Ronald Reagan in 1980. Contrarily, remember how Al Gore’s sighs during his first debate with George W. Bush hurt him in 2000.

Indeed Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, weighed in at the press club with research showing that debates, misleading statements or not, hardly change any votes. But, she said, they do educate the public about candidates’ positions, so once they know who won, they have a clearer idea of what to expect from a new president.

A recent nationwide poll by the center showed the public still has a lot of education ahead because:

• Only 23 percent knew that payroll taxes have decreased since Obama became president.
• Only 25 percent knew that it was untrue to say Romney had ever asked for a government bailout to help Bain Capital.
• Only 31 percent knew it was untrue to say Romney planned to eliminate Pell grants to low-income college students.
• But 54 percent knew it was untrue that Obama had dropped all work requirements for welfare.
• And 79 percent knew that the unemployment rate has been over 8 percent for more than a year.

The Annenberg Center, which sponsored the event, has been working to promote fact-checking by local television stations, especially of the ads which come from outside groups, not from candidates, and which the stations are not legally obligated to run (although they can charge higher rates for them). She reported that respondents to the poll who visited fact-checking sites or news sites to examine campaign claims were significantly more likely to answer factual questions like those above correctly.

But misleading or downright false claims rarely hurt the perpetrator. It’s only when a candidate acquires a reputation for lying or exaggerating that it matters. It happened to Gore in 2000, when the press unfairly seized on his artlessly phrased but accurate claim that in Congress he had been a leader in fighting for funding for what became the Internet. He never said he “invented” the Internet, but that became a damaging press shorthand, recalled whenever he said something else that could be challenged factually.

My own experience as a formal fact-checking reporter was limited, but it supports the idea that verification or contradiction may enlighten a few readers or viewers but does not change votes.

I covered President Carter’s debate with Reagan in 1980. The next day I wrote that it produced “almost as many contradictions of fact as disputes over policy.” The phrase, “contradictions of fact,” was 1980 New York Times-speak for “falsehoods” or “lies.”

I wrote that those “contradictions were scattered, like sample ballots on a windy Election Day, throughout the transcript,” and often touched on issues that mattered. The article went through many of them. There was Reagan’s false denial that he had ever said nuclear non-proliferation, a Carter touchstone, was not “any of our business.” There was Carter’s claim that Reagan favored voluntary Social Security, a position Reagan had advocated in 1964 but thereafter only said should be studied. And so on.

The article closed on a note that seems relevant today:

For weeks the Carter forces have argued that, in a debate with Mr. Reagan, the president would show himself in much better command of detail. He may have done so, particularly in regard to Mr. Reagan’s record. But it is far from clear that the national television audience, estimated at up to 120 million people, was more impressed by detailed arguments, with lots of numbers, than by the relaxed manner and the ability to shrug off an attack that Mr. Reagan regularly displayed.

I know Jim Lehrer has more suggestions for questions than he could ask in a week, let alone 90 minutes. But it might be worthwhile to test the candidates’ ability to shrug off questions about their lying ads, and see if their manner remains as calm as Reagan’s was in 1980.

An earlier version of this article misstated Richard Nixon’s political position in 1960; he was the incumbent vice president, not the incumbent president.

Adam Clymer was a reporter and editor for The Times for 26 years. He retired as the Washington correspondent in 2003.