The 2012 elections ushered in a new age of politics: the post-truth era. While this was of course a problem before 2011 — stretching the truth to fit one’s needs is a time-honored tradition in politics — it became ubiquitous during the 2012 presidential election and has been ever since.
There are a variety of possible reasons for this trend: the increased spending of outside groups on elections, the rise of the Tea Party (although this is inexorably linked to the spending by outside groups) and the news media’s desire to present two sides of a story on equal footing, even if one is simply not true. Wisconsin, of course, is not immune to this problem. If the early stages of the gubernatorial campaign are any indication, this will be a long, lie-filled election season.
To anyone who has followed Wisconsin politics for the last few years, it should come as no surprise that Gov. Scott Walker occasionally has trouble with the truth. According to PolitiFact Wisconsin, Walker has made four statements rated “false” and one rated as “pants on fire” since late October. Last year, I wrote about Walker’s comically blatant lie about a bow-and-arrow shooting incident.
Walker’s Democratic opponent for governor, Mary Burke, has not had much better luck with the truth so far. In her first major ad of the campaign released last week, Burke seems to claim, or at least strongly insinuate, that unemployment under Walker has risen from 4.8 percent to 6.2 percent. This is simply not true — unemployment was 7.2 percent when Walker took office — and Burke’s statement was rated as “pants on fire” by Politifact. In January, Burke said Walker’s tax plan would “increase taxes for nearly 80 percent of people in the state,” which Politifact called “false and ridiculous,” and was again rated “pants on fire.” While these lies may be helpful in painting Walker in a negative light, introducing herself on a statewide stage with a series of lies is probably less than ideal.
What’s puzzling is that Burke would turn to lobbing lies at Walker when there are so many legitimate issues to attack him on. For example, rather than lying about unemployment under Walker, Burke could go after Walker’s greatest vulnerability: his promise to create 250,000 new jobs during his first term in office, which he is nowhere close to completing. Or she could discuss the Republican party’s apparent voter-suppression fetish, which is once again in the news. Why Burke would base her first TV ad on a misleading statement rather than one of a smorgasbord of legitimate issues is beyond me. This is especially strange considering a poll released Wednesday by the Republican-biased polling firm Rasmussen has her and Walker in a dead heat — she doesn’t need half-truths (or less-than-half truths) to keep up with the current governor in the polls.
As a side note, one of the more amusing aspects of the post-truth era of politics is watching politicians take a brief break from telling their own lies to feign indignation about another politicians’ mistruths: for example, Walker’s response to Burke’s first TV ad.
The people of Wisconsin aren’t stupid. We can tell when we’re being lied to, especially with the help of media outfits like Politifact. The vast majority of Wisconsinites, with the exception of the especially closed-minded at either end of the political spectrum, are interested in the truth and care about the actual facts. Hopefully both candidates for governor will realize this, so we can have a campaign about policies to help the people of Wisconsin rather than baseless lies about the opposing candidate.
Joe Timmerman ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in math and economics with a computer science certificate.
