Politics and False Advertising

First off, this Slate article asks the wrong question. It shouldn't be "Why doesn't Barack Obama Lie More Often?" -- stated as if that would be a good thing -- but "Why Isn't McCain Held Accountable For His Lies?"

So, why isn't he? Taking ads out on television that are knowingly false is normally against the law. The catch is, the laws only apply to "commercial " activity, and political campaigning doesn't fall under that heading. Although, I think that probably the Supreme Court could manage to interpret things so that it did, if it wanted to. It's managed to interpret corporations as people, and women and blacks as non-people, over the course of history, so why not politicians as profit-seekers -- it would be less of a stretch than those others, no?

In commercial false advertising cases, guilty companies have to pony up punitive damages and/or live up to the advertisement they made. In 1998, Gateway 2000 paid $290,000 for advertising the gaurantee of full refunds and then giving only partial ones. In 2003, Nike agreed to pay $1.5 million to settle a case regarding its labor practices in Third World countries. Just this summer, Airborne agreed to pay $23.3 million after it falsely advertised that its product cured the common cold.

If presidential candidates were held to the same or higher standards, the campaigns would surely be more straightforward, less dirty, and voters would have a better chance of making a truly educated choice at the polls. Since court cases can often take years, the Supreme Court could agree to hear cases involving false campaign advertising immediately, so that campaigns would have to pay up while the campaign still waged on. Or an independent counsel could be appointed to monitor campaign advertising. Either way, politicians would face immediate punishment for lying in their ads.

What if the McCain campaign had to pony up a $1.5 million for advertising that Obama planned to raise taxes on the middle class? Or $3 million for claiming that Obama called for kindergartners to receive "comprehensive sex eductation." It would straighten out pretty quickly, without a doubt.

The stakes involved in presidential campaigns are even higher than they are in most, if not all, commercial cases, so it would logically follow that the standard for them should be even higher -- there ought to be at the very least some measure of accountability when politicians make statements of supposed fact. Otherwise, he who lies most probably has the best chance of winning.