With the election less than a month away, campaigns are running a barrage of ads trying to lure the party faithful to the polls and convince the undecided to vote for them. Too bad so many of the “facts” in campaign commercials are lies.
“The state of factual accuracy in the 2006 elections is, frankly, poor — as it has been in previous elections,” said Brooks Jackson last week at the University of Baltimore.
Jackson knows of what he speaks. He runs FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group that monitors national political television advertising for accuracy.
It’s most recent post highlights Republican U.S. Senate candidate Michael Steele’s now infamous “puppy” ad. In it, he accuses Democratic candidate Ben Cardin of, among other things, taking money from special interest groups — something Steele claims to want to ban.
The group finds: “The ad makes it appear as if Steele has not received contributions from special interest groups when, in fact, he has.” He also does not mention his party affiliation. We agree.
Steele is not alone in the state in producing misleading ads.
Take Democratic gubernatorial candidate and Baltimore City Mayor Martin O’Malley’s claim in a commercial that he has created thousands of jobs in the city.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics disproves that claim. Since O’Malley took office in December of 1999, the city has actually lost about 37,000 jobs.
How does O’Malley explain this? In a recent interview with The Baltimore Examiner he said, “The claim of the ad is that we’ve created thousands of new jobs. That claim is true. The extrapolation of that is that we’ve created a lot more jobs than we’ve lost. That’snot true.”
Huh?
Reasonable, even thoughtful, people would assume “creating” jobs means creating more jobs than are lost. Second, politicians never “create” jobs. They can only influence economic conditions through policy, so using the term makes no sense.
Such duplicity debases politics and breeds voter apathy. Why vote when the choice is between candidates whose lies render their records and beliefs indiscernible? And how can those candidates who win claim a voter mandate?
Maryland voters deserve to know why they should cast a vote and for whom.
