Republican presidential candidate John McCain and his campaign are drawing criticism for not telling the truth. It's gotten so bad that the media, politicians, and Barack Obama have unleashed a new L-word – lie – to describe the state of the stump. Even George Bush's low-blow specialist Karl Rove, mentor to chief McCain campaign strategist Steve Schmidt, declared the campaign has "gone too far".

Barack Obama and his camp are being called for their fibs as well, but McCain is catching more heat, and deservedly so. The McCain-Palin advertisments feature more lies and bigger lies than the Obama side. McCain and company persist in telling lies even after they've been called on them.

"Obama will raise your taxes" is true when McCain says it to his millionaire wife, but not to the 97% of Americans earning less than $250,000 a year.

"I told Congress 'thanks but no thanks' on that bridge to nowhere," Palin continues to repeat, long after the record has been reviewed to show she initially supported the bridge and that Congress killed it before she did. Moreover, Alaska got those pork barrel funds anyway to finance other projects.

It's no surprise that the McCain campaign keeps telling lies. In the movie Animal House, one of the Delta fraternity pledges is entrusted to care for his big brother's Cadillac. After the fraternity boys ruin the car, one frat boy proposes hiding the wreck, reporting the car stolen, and letting his brother collect the insurance for a replacement. "Do you think it'll work?" the pledge asks.

His fraternity brother replies, "It's bound to work better than the truth."

That's the McCain campaign's central thesis. McCain has supported President Bush – a president with an approval rating below 30% - 90% of the time. Do the math: that doesn't offer much hope of winning on the facts. So his campaign brews distractions to sidestep real issues. "This campaign is not about issues," campaign manager Rick Davis declared.

Many find it particularly hypocritical that McCain, who founded his reputation on straight talk, has resorted to lies, distortions and doubletalk. Some say he's sold his soul for a last grasp at the presidency. But maybe - just maybe - we've got McCain wrong. Maybe the lies are not calculated to misrepresent his record or Obama's. Maybe they're part of a larger strategy.

Maybe McCain is really chasing a vast bloc of voters that candidates usual ignore, at least explicitly. In this tight race, the outcome could come down to America's vast hypocrite vote.

For example, the 26% of Americans that describe themselves as evangelical Christians have strong hypocritical tendencies, politically at least. Evangelicals first became a political force in the 1980 presidential election, when they abandoned small town Sunday school teacher and born-again Christian Jimmy Carter for divorced, Hollywood actor and infrequent churchgoer Ronald Reagan.

A Pew Research survey released early this year found that evangelicals are nearly as likely to be living together out of wedlock as the public at large and more likely to be divorced. Perhaps more telling, the Barna Group found that only about one in five self-proclaimed evangelicals actually hold the tradition's key core beliefs. Underscoring that point, evangelicals have loudly applauded Bristol Palin, the 17-year-old pregnant daughter of the Republican vice presidential candidate, as a goddess of life rather than condemn her as a sinner. One suspects they wouldn't be quite so forgiving if it was an Obama offspring was the mother-to-be – or the shotgun groom.

But hypocrisy cuts across religious as well as party lines. Tens of millions of Americans talk the talk but don't walk the walk or think things through. They drive their SUVs to Earth Day rallies. They watch Fox News and parrot complaints about the media's liberal bias. They believe America needs to keep good, high wage jobs at home yet shop at Wal-Mart, Chinese exporters' best customer. They don't see a contradiction or even a connection between abstinence-only sex education and pregnancy crisis centres.

For them, McCain offers not just a hypocritical campaign, but a hypocritical agenda for the White House. After 26 years on Capitol Hill, President McCain will reform Washington and put the lobbyists who run his campaign out of business. He'll cut taxes, yet balance the budget. He'll reduce regulation yet bring order to Wall Street. He'll continue the American war in Iraq to victory, even though there's little sign of political progress among Iraqi factions despite the decrease in violence. He'll stop global warming while providing bigger fixes to satisfy America's addiction to oil.

In short, McCain will keep doing what Bush has done, but, he says, the results will be different. That's not just hypocritical. That's insane.