In this context, I would like to draw attention to yet another odd recent case of political meta-reporting. Here, two Politico authors would like to take a moment to explain how, of the two campaigns fighting for the next presidency, it is Barack Obama who wins the prize for the the most personally mean campaign:



[T]here is a particular category of the 2012 race to the low road in which the two sides are not competing on equal terms: Obama and his top campaign aides have engaged far more frequently in character attacks and personal insults than the Romney campaign.

Romney has woven throughout his campaign the charge that Obama simply doesn’t understand American values. Romney has called Obama’s vision “extraordinarily foreign” and accused him of believing the United States is “just another nation with a flag.” A prominent Romney surrogate, former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu, said on a conference call that Obama should “learn how to be an American.” In a Fox News appearance, Sununu said that Obama “spent his early years in Hawaii smoking something [and] spent the next set of years in Indonesia.”

Now this is an interesting premise. In order to make it work, the authors first have to explicitly dismiss four years of personal attacks against Obama, including the ones currently underway in this very campaign, because "few" have come from Mitt Romney or "his official representatives"—thus proving that indeed, campaigns are correct in presuming that attacks by surrogates or their organizations can be undertaken at will with little danger to their own candidate. The reporters do mention the conspicuous Romney history of gutting candidates like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum with personal attacks. They do mention the Romney association with the hollow headed birther Donald Trump. They even acknowledge the implications of Obama's "foreign"-ness (or, if you prefer, his allegedly insufficient knowledge of "how to be an American") brought forth on multiple occasions by both Romney and his surrogates, which would seem to be one of the most mean spirited and personal attacks you could make against someone running for national office:Conspicuously, the cutting and pasting of Obama remarks in order to make it appear that he is insulting strapping American businessmen does not rate as personal attack.

How, then, do we get to the conclusion that the "verdict is in", and the Obama campaign is qualitatively the more personally negative one? By way of a second and neater trick, which is simply to declare that anything touching on Mitt Romney's past record is a negative attack, and therefore mean, and therefore Obama is the mean one for doing it.



With a few exceptions, Romney has maintained that Obama is a bad president who has turned to desperate tactics to try to save himself. But Romney has not made the case that Obama is a bad person, nor made a sustained critique of his morality a central feature of his campaign. Obama, who first sprang to national attention with an appeal to civility, has made these kind of attacks central to his strategy. The argument, by implication from Obama and directly from his surrogates, is not merely that Romney is the wrong choice for president but that there is something fundamentally wrong with him. To make the case, Obama and his aides have used an arsenal of techniques — personal ridicule, suggestions of ethical misdeeds and aspersions against Romney’s patriotism — that many voters and commentators claim to abhor, even as the tactics have regularly proved effective.

Obama senior adviser David Axelrod early in the campaign called Romney “a charlatan.” Senior White House adviser David Plouffe made the same hollow-man argument during the GOP primaries: “You get the sense with Mitt Romney that if he thought it was good to say the sky was green and the grass was blue to win an election, he’d say it.”

So Obama campaign attacks are more often premised on the morality of the other candidate than Romney campaign attacks are? Fine; let us suppose it, for the moment. Let us examine the provided examples:Not a sentiment unique to (or even originating with) the Obama campaign. Mitt Romney has, in his relatively short political career, claimed to be both staunchly pro-choice and avidly not; asserted himself to be both a moderate and a "severe" conservative; worked to achieve an individual healthcare mandate in his own state, only to lambaste the same law applied nationally as an abomination. The question of where Mitt Romney stands on any number of issues is an eyebrow-raiser, at best; are such inconsistencies valid examples of character? Of insincerity?

There was a time not long ago at all when it would be the press itself querying a candidate about seemingly implausible or insufficiently explicated personal positions. Determining where a candidate stood on an issue was an unquestionably legitimate function of the press; determining, also, whether that position was feigned or credible was also a legitimate line of questioning. On the most hotly contested issues of the moment, things like abortion, birth control, the role of government in healthcare, the positions of each candidate are, unquestionably, of importance to voters. Apparent misrepresentation of those positions by the candidate, based on their past statements and actions, is of no less importance—and may be of more.

So yes, to the extent that questioning someone's apparent insincerity on issues is a questioning of their character, it is a personal attack. So stipulated. Here, though, is the question: is questioning a candidate's apparent insincerity on issues an invalid attack? An out of bounds one? The connotation of the piece is that making something of a candidate's alarming pattern of self-reversal is something to be chastised or tsked at, is somehow an illegitimate line of inquiry because it touches on who the candidate is as a person, as opposed to that they have stated on the tin. That, if true, would be an alarming development. If the legislative history of a candidate is now off limits, or if seeming inconsistencies in that history are no longer either to be probed by the press or allowed arguments by opponents, then we have lopped off one of the few definitive mechanisms we have to truly know what that person would do, once elected. That seems unwise.



The next example:



Obama’s campaign has suggested Romney is deceitful or corrupt. Deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter, highlighting inconsistencies in Romney’s explanation of his departure from Bain Capital, suggested that Romney is “misrepresenting his position at Bain to the SEC, which is a felony.” The alternative, she said, is Romney was lying to the American people. Last weekend, Cutter said that Romney and Paul Ryan think “lying is a virtue,” judging from the factual misrepresentations of the GOP convention.

I believe the emphasis in the original Cutter remark was on the thought that Romney was very unlikely indeed to misrepresent himself to an agency that could put him in jail for such a thing, and so that the second of the two possibilities—that he was not being truthful in his current campaign—was more likely. This possibility would seemingly be further backed up by the later observation that Romney had taken a tax exemption that he was only allowed to take if his role in the company during the time in question was "material", thus suggesting that it was, indeed, material. At the very least, the phrase highlighting inconsistencies should figure prominently here, as much of the press corps at the time (at least, the ones paying any attention) were themselves stumped as to what role Romney had, when, when it comes to some of Bain's more dubious business plays. Are those questions legitimate ones? One would presume. Are pointing out inconsistencies, or gaps, or outright stonewalling of the candidate legitimate areas of inquiry? One would hope. Is pointing out a specific inconsistency that would seem to indicate that the candidate has fudged his answers in either one direction or another a reasonable course of action for either the press or the opposing campaign? One would bloody well hope so.

The second, though, cuts to the bone: "Cutter said that Romney and Paul Ryan think 'lying is a virtue,' judging from the factual misrepresentations of the GOP convention." Having just mentioned the most blatant, orchestrated lie of the entire convention, one with film clips and speakers and banners and an entire convention theme centered around it, one that we just got through discussing as being so ridiculous and brazen, so obvious a lie as to cause a good portion of American press-watchers to wonder what, if anything, the national press would do about it, or whether they would just sail by the whole premise on the way to filing another report on what the balloon drop was like, I think wondering whether the candidates involved thought that lying was a virtue is in fact a damn fine and sensible question to ask. It is a question that reporters themselves might ask, in fact. If a campaign is so bold as to say that their actions will not be "dictated" by "fact-checkers" then that seems a rather straightforward declaration that the campaign does not find themselves particularly devoted to facts; if they are so bold as to base an entire convention on a chopped audio clip, even more so. Do they consider lying to be a political virtue? A campaign virtue?

Again, is the attack personal? Fine, let us say that it is. Let us say that calling a campaign deceitful, when you have just damn well seen an actual, provable example of deceit, is an attack on the candidate's character. Is that considered, now, to be the offense? The deceit itself, the press will not touch, the press will not note as a mark against a potential leader's character—but pointing out the deceit will get a mournful four-page article scolding such personal attacks?

These seems, from the press, a morally indefensible position. You cannot both ignore a lie and chastise the person who does point it out. You cannot claim that a flat lie is simply part of the political game, but judging the moral character of person who would make it is a bridge to far. That does not rate as lazy reporting, that does not rate as lazy punditry, that does not rate as he-said, she-said-ism, or balanced or anything else. No: that is just wrong. It is wrong on a moral scale. It is not just bad journalism, but anti-journalism. It is something very close to propagandizing itself, and the phrase very close is a generosity on my part.



Example the third:



Obama’s campaign and surrogates say Romney’s business decisions and his personal finances call his patriotism into question. Speaking Tuesday night at the convention here, former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland said “Mitt Romney has so little economic patriotism that even his money needs a passport. It summers on the beaches of the Cayman Islands and winters on the slopes of the Swiss Alps.” A little later, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley pummeled Romney over his offshore funds: “Swiss bank accounts never built an American bridge. Swiss bank accounts don’t put cops on the beat or teachers in our classrooms.” An Obama campaign ad criticizing Romney’s tenure as a “corporate CEO” who outsourced jobs concluded with the observation, “It’s just what you expect from a guy who had a Swiss bank account.”

Having just dismissed Romney surrogates such as Trump as members of the campaign, it seems more than a bit odd to include them on the other side, but again, so stipulated: Those were very not-nice things for the former governors to say. It is not quite the same as asserting that Mr. Romney's very nationality itself is in question, but since we are questioning the nationality of his money, now, I can see why many would believe this new sin to be even worse.

The context of the assertion is the question of whether Romney's business dealings indicate negative things about the man. I am not sure I have heard the campaign call it economic patriotism, as the story puts it, but there is unquestionably public suspicion of anyone with a dreaded Swiss bank account, synonymous in the public mind with money laundering and tax cheats—not, in ought to be mentioned, without cause. Having accounts in multiple such nations is a bit sketchier; a public acknowledgement (or half-acknowlegement) that those accounts are, in fact, intended to produce tax advantages is sketchier still. No, there is nothing illegal about manipulating finances in an attempt to pay Uncle Sam not one thin dime more than is absolutely necessary—but in the larger context of a very heated, decade-long national battle over the obligations of the rich and the rights of the poor, it provides a too-close example of the very thing half the nation has been complaining about.

That raises a question. Is there such a thing as economic patriotism? Or to put it less jingoistically, regardless of whether manipulating one's finances to avoid paying taxes to one's own nation is a legal failing, is it a moral one? Is it a valid measure of one's commitment to country, for someone who is both very rich and who is seeking a position of high authority in that country? It is a philosophical question, and perhaps one with no simplistic answer, but it seems at least to be a valid topic of debate. We have just seen one of the founders of Facebook leave the country with little more emotion involved then a meh; there are public discussions of a new (or not so new?) breed of wealth that considers itself nationless; there is a larger context here. Asking whether someone puts their money where their mouth is so common a phrase as to have become trite, but trite or not, if a candidate has not put their money in the same nation that their mouth resides, that does seem more than a bit odd to people. At the least, it suggests someone whose own placed bets are not consistent with what the rest of the country might benefit from.

The other half of it, here, seems more pressing:



And then there was the infamous ad from the pro-Obama group Priorities USA Action, featuring a laid-off steelworker, Joe Soptic, recounting how he lost his job and health insurance when Bain closed a factory. Years later, Soptic’s wife died and the man pins Romney with some responsibility: “I do not think Mitt Romney realizes what he’s done to anyone. And furthermore, I do not think Mitt Romney is concerned.”

The context: Vulture capitalism. The practice of leveraged purchases of individual companies, with no particular concern or expertise about the widgets that company makes or the marketplace in which that company finds itself, based on the cold calculation of the worth of the company measured against its price and its debts, a practice explicitly intended for short term gain regardless of the longer well-being of the firm in question, a practice so loathed that it even decades ago became a solid career choice for movie villains. That Mitt Romney, current candidate for the presidency of the United States, engaged in the practice no longer seems particularly open to debate—which is one of the reasons the question of timing has come into play, because Mr. Romney has a keen interest in distancing himself from some of his company's most now-notorious deals.

Further context: A healthcare debate so omnipresent and vicious that it has sent various fragments of the county into meltdown. The decline of the middle class, caused in large part by companies deciding that the quickest path to profit is to extract it from their own workforce. The American shift from blue-collar careers to mere blue-collar jobs, the decimation of pensions and workplace benefits, the deterioration of the implicit promise that a loyalty of worker to company would be met with a similar loyalty of company to worker, the ever-increasing shift from American manufacturing to American financial speculation. Vulture capitalism, again.

There is a lot more here than personal attack. A pure personal attack might be you smell terrible or your hair looks like a rat nested in it; this, though, is a recounting of events, and a suggestion that the flavor of capitalism of which Romney partook—let me rephrase that, the flavor of capitalism that Mitt Romney instilled as corporate culture, in the company he governed, and turned into policy, and therefore the one that he holds responsibility for regardless of which deals he inked with his own hand, which deals he oversaw from a distance, and which ones he merely pocketed the proceeds from—has consequences. The profits gained by acquiring a company and mortgaging it for profit do not appear from thin air; someone, somewhere, is having those profits extracted from them. Often, it is thousands of someones, or tens of thousands, and with no say in the matter on their parts.

Is it a personal attack? Hmm. We have seen one Bain success story, Staples, prominently held up as a Romney totem; a rebuttal would seem to be within the rules of play. There has furthermore been suggestion that the early success stories such as Staples were veered away from and replaced with this new, more explicitly vulture-oriented model during the period of time when Romney was unambiguously in charge of things—that would seem worth pursuing as well, if any reporters felt like taking time off from the duties of reporting on which campaign staffers were muttering about what, on any particular day.

So here, then, is the question: Is there such a thing as immoral economic behavior? Common sense would indicate a yes. Did Bain Capital engage in such behaviors? The percentages are disputed, but the bare answer is yes, again. As the head of that company and its most conspicuous profiteer, does that behavior transfer to Romney himself? I can think of no rationale for thinking otherwise. Is the moral character of a candidate a valid measure of their suitability for high office?

God help us if it is not.



Example the last:



Obama and his aides have portrayed Romney as a figure of ridicule, a kind of modern-day Thurston Howell III. The president mocked Romney’s use of the word “marvelous,” saying, “It’s a word you don’t often hear.” In Iowa last month, he made jeering references at three stops in a row to a story from the early ’80s about how Romney’s dog, Seamus, was put in a crate atop the car on Romney family vacations.

Ridiculous and asinine.

Willard Mitt Romney is, and I swear this, the only person I have ever heard to unironically use the singular of the word sport in contexts such as I play sport, or I enjoy sport, or Do you play sport? While this may not be a definitive measure of character—I strongly suspect it is not, in fact—it is a regionalism I am unfamiliar with, unless we are to count The Great Gatsby as a regional dialect. Again, I am no expert. That Mitt Romney is a damn awkward fellow, however, would be a difficult thing to dispute. His various malapropisms and unintentional insults on the campaign trail are the stuff of comedy; he may be the only candidate in memory to complement someone on the low quality of their rain gear, or whose most memorable comments on sport seem to revolve mostly around the team owners he knows, or who cheerfully suggests that the products of a beloved local bakery are indistinguishable from the stuff gotten at the local gas station. He is an odd duck. Sometimes it is endearing, and sometimes it is infuriating, and most often of all it is simply a bit off, a certain verbal or facial expression that seems naggingly out of place, but he is an odd duck. This is not something the Obama campaign bears responsibility for—you will have to issue citations to every late night talk show host in America first, before you work your way up the chain to the likes of the Obama campaign.

I must issue a professional judgment on this one; such thin mocking of a politician for their various imperfections is not, and never will be, a sin. Not in that gentle way, at least. And not if the vast majority of people have been saying the same thing since long before you, personally, opened your mouth on it. A joke is only funny to the listener if they get the joke, and chiding someone on their odd language or peculiar old stories is only funny if the listener is thinking the exact same thing. I hereby declare that Kerry was often wooden-sounding, and Al Gore was often wonkish, and Clinton should damn well have not done that thing he did, and George W. Bush's vacant eyes and mumbling speech patterns made him sound like the biggest man-child to ever have access to the nuclear button, and that Mitt Romney is, yes, a little damn bit weird. Whether it is because he is rich enough to need a separate elevator in order to fit all his cars into his modestly sized beachfront property, or whether it is a product of his particular business or social spheres, or whether it is intrinsic to his genetic nature, who knows—but asking others to ignore it is asking more than most people are able to give. If Mark Twain were alive today, he would be grinning from ear to ear with every sport and marvelous that crossed this man's lips, and he would be writing it all down, and then some.

This complaint, then, just seems out of place compared to the others. I suppose I will grant a point for the Seamus reference, which was mean, but which I will balance out with one individual instance Trump questioning of the presidential birthplace, thus calling the whole thing a draw. And by draw, I am again being charitable.



Here, then, is the final question: if a candidate's character seems legitimately in question, does questioning that character still rate as a "personal" attack? And if so, are all personal attacks illegitimate, regardless of whatever factual evidence they might have to back them?

Or, to put it another way, suppose a true moral sack of crap ran for the office—a liar, a cheat, a con man, a crook in every way. Would the press take note? Would they press the point? Or would they declare that discussing such things were off-limits? Would they further declare that even other people raising the issue was off-limits as well, thus insulating even an outright felon from having his misdeeds used as evidence of his character?

We must assume that would not happen, because if the press really did behave that day, we would be better off simply burning them all at the stake right now, rather than living with the results of that. That means there must be some balance, in the middle, in which pointing out a candidate's past statements, past actions, and the past consequences of each are valid as measures of the man, and even valuable information to set before voters. The question then becomes where to draw those lines, and that is tricky—but I do not believe it is as tricky as some in the press might have us believe.

Are exploring past statements of a candidate, when they are in direct conflict with the candidate's current assertions, a valid inquiry? Of course. The verbal credibility of a candidate, coupled with their past actual history on those same issues, is nearly the only hint the larger public has on whether the candidate will actually do what they assert they will do, upon gaining office. It is therefore certainly a valid inquiry for the press; if the press feels no need to do it, it seems poor form indeed to scold other persons who might. You might once have seen such questioning on 60 Minutes, or laid out point-by-point by any number of revered media figures, back before candidates were quite so able to choose their own preferred questioners and questions.

If a candidate rather transparently lies, or has their campaign or party lie on their behalf, is it valid to call them a liar? Why would it not be? If we are going from post-truth politics directly into not giving a damn about the personal character of our leaders at all, that is a hell of a thing—and it would be quite the change, as well. This speaks to the single worst feature, and biggest challenge, of the current press, which is the apparent inability to call out fraudulent statements as fraudulent, thus depriving the entire nation of an informed discourse, and our democracy, of the informed consent of the governed. To not point out fraudulent statements, and to do so from within the confines of the supposedly free and neutral press itself—that is the most immoral act of all. To do so based on oversight is mere incompetence. To do so on the basis of civility or camaraderie is to be an accessory to the act.

Is pointing out the past business history of a public figure a valid inquiry? Such a thing was once called investigative reporting, and was not merely allowed, but considered one of the highest and best accomplishments of the free press. Now there is damn little of it, but what thin pickings remain, when it comes to questioning how close the candidate skirts the lines of various tax codes (failing to fill out the proper paperwork for a maid or nanny or other household service: instant political death), still certainly speak to a person's character. The public can feel fairly safe presuming that an honest businessman would make a better leader than a dishonest one, and that someone who is willing to harm others for personal gain in their past is probably the sort to do so again, if given the opportunity.

Is pointing out that someone is simply, well, just a bit awkward in public a valid observation? This is the toughest of all, primarily because it is the only one that truly counts as petty. It is also the only one that the press still regularly manages itself. No, the personal failings and curious tics of each candidate are, to many pundits, nearly the only things worth reporting on. The public wants to know what their prospective leaders are like, the argument goes, and if a candidate is awkward or seems, shudder, out of touch, then you can bet that the more vapid half of all the pundits in Washington will make it a staple of their political reporting. Two words: earth tones. No, it seems that whether we think the personal quirks of candidates are off-limits or not is entirely irrelevant, because the very arbiters of our discourse have declared such things to be the very things most worth dwelling on, most worth commenting on, most worth picking apart and, yes, most worth mocking. We have been outvoted. At the least, though, we should ask the analysts of the press to have the common decency to not scold others for it, since that is a bit much.

Yes, personal attacks are bad. We are all in agreement. The question is what constitutes a personal attack versus a substantive one, and whether a substantive attack can be declared off-limits simply because it speaks to the character of the one being argued against. All substantive objections to a candidate speak to the character of that candidate. All observations of past behavior, of current behavior, of record and stated promises and all the rest speak to the character of the candidate. That is the entire point. Absent time travel, character is the only measure of a candidate we actually have.



Perhaps oddly, none of this is meant as a defense of the Obama campaign, nor do they need any from the likes of me. It is, rather, an expression of shock at a press that seems, in places, to have degraded just far enough that they see the very things that were once considered their actual jobs to be, now, uncouth. Probing past inconsistencies is now supposedly too personal; investigating an individual's business ethics, also supposedly too personal; even pointing out what seems to be a very, very blatant lie now seems to be tittered about primarily as being an insult to the liar. That is dark satire, indeed. I could handle press incompetence at these things, but even the smallest thought that the press is now going to proceed to act as outright enforcers of this national degradation into substanceless is too much. If an attack on someone's character has substance, then it may very well be both a character attack and a substantive attack, and the value of the latter must outweigh concerns about the civility of the former. If a person's character is suspect, it would be more pleasant to find that out before electing them than after, though finding it out afterwards is still far better than never discovering it at all, no matter what mischief they manage to accomplish. That was once the point of the political press; regardless, it is still the point of our elections. We do not refrain from presenting evidence against suspected criminals because doing so would be impolite; we should not refrain from presenting evidence against dubious politicians because it is impolite, either. The two groups, if we are honest, are not that far apart.

A person from one campaign said that their opponents seemed to think "lying is a virtue." The uncomfortable bit is that they were, indeed, talking about an actual lie, and a very, very big one, and an excruciatingly provable one. Which side you consider to have done the more outrageous thing, in that single exchange, is a mark of whether you value comity over truth. It is a ten-second test of your moral compass; if your chosen profession is one historically premised on the value of truth over comity—as professional point of honor, no less—it is a test of something even more simple than that.

And it is a test of character, yes. There are such things, and the outcome matters.

