Opinion: Both parties pants are on fire

With the addition of Paul Ryan to the Republican ticket of 2012, the presidential campaign can now begin in earnest. Of course, that means that the candidates will now begin to really spew forth whoppers, in the hope that We the People are obtuse and will eagerly believe the aforementioned whoppers, garnished with little white lies and other partial truths for seasoning. After all, truthfulness has seldom, if ever, got anyone elected to the highest office in the land.

According to Mitt Romney, President Obama is a job-killing, free-spending, big-government liberal whose policies deepened the recession and threatened free-market capitalism. Romney, with a straight face no less, claimed that the president has spent tax dollars “at a pace without precedent in recent history.” The Governor continued “and added almost as much debt as all the prior presidents combined.” This, by the way, is a claim we hear in pretty much every presidential campaign.

As President Obama jets around the country, primarily in the swing states, he presents a somewhat divergent self-portrait, that of a job-creating, frugal minded, government reducing pragmatist who saved the United States from even another Great Depression. He claims, while earnestly reading from his teleprompter, that “government employment has gone down and federal government spending has increased at the lowest pace in nearly 60 years.”

With the presidential race primarily focused on the budget and the economy, the president and Governor Romney are cramming their speeches with facts and figures created specifically to embellish their case and diminish the claims of the other guy, in the process often making outrageous claims fundamentally at odds with one another. In short, both candidates are at times telling lies, using statistics without context, and magnifying their own records while demeaning their opponent’s.

Each candidate’s advertising campaign regularly accuses the other of being a lying, cheating jerk. As in any campaign, there is a tendency to write both sides off, as if every disingenuous statement carried the same weight. Truth be known, some untruths are more fundamental than others, more egregious, more germane to the broader argument. For example, Mitt, in his book “No Apology” falsely charged, according to independent fact checkers, that President Obama had traveled the world apologizing for America.

Actually determining who the biggest liar is can be complicated exercise, even in this age of fact checkers. When PolitiFact, The Tampa Bay Times’ Pulitzer-prize winning fact checking project, evaluated their statements, it determined that more of Governor Romney’s were untrue than President Obama’s. The Washington Post, however, gave them each approximately the same average “Pinocchio scores” – its measure of untruth – to both candidates.

Often, the truth or untruth of a claim depends on definitions or on when you start counting. For instance, when it comes to unemployment, Governor Romney counts from the month when President Obama first took office and inherited an economy that was spinning off jobs at historic rates. President Obama, on the other hand, prefers to count form 2010, to give his policies time to begin taking effect, and the job picture had begun turning around, thereby dodging blame for the job losses at the start of his term.

One thing remains clear: Both candidates have mastered the ancient political art of creative storytelling. The bottom line is that we can’t believe either of them, or any politician for that matter – excepting Mac Thornberry – who seems to be honest and decent, according to his constituency. I’ve yet to meet him.

One example of their disdain for telling the truth can be found in their claims regarding job creation. President Obama claims, “Over four million jobs created in the last two years.” Governor Romney counters, “He has not created jobs.”

Job creation has to be the single most important consideration of this election, and the veracity of claims made by each is of paramount importance to our economic issues and this race. Yet each candidate intentionally distorts the question of job creation. By counting from January 2009, Governor Romney paints the bleak picture of a country that despite a modest recovery still have fewer jobs than it did when President Obama took office. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “the country has 552,000 fewer jobs now than when the president was inaugurated.”

Conversely, President Obama starts his count in March 2010, after the money from his stimulus law was flowing and payrolls began increasing again. Also, he generally cites private-sector employment, so that he can say 4.3 million jobs have been created. If he also counted government work forces, the job growth is actually lower, 3.8 million jobs, according to the bureau. The difference is government job losses are not counted.

So, depending upon where you start counting, President Obama either increased or lost jobs. Neither candidate’s claims reflect the truth. I tend to put more trust in Mitt’s claim on this.

Similar untrue claims and counter claims are made by the candidates about other critical issues, including: the federal debt; the size of government; economics; and tax cuts.

I’m disappointed that neither side has candidly and openly told us the truth on issues paramount to the future of this country. Shame on the candidates and political parties, We the People deserve better.