Facts are Secondary

During the general election stage of a political campaign, candidates are given the opportunity to provide information to the public. But what does the public do when both candidates operate on different realities?

During the vice presidential debate, there were several instances of each candidate, in one way or another, saying, "that's not true," in rebuttal. So who are we supposed to believe? Immediately after watching the debates, I took Joe Biden's word over Palin's on several disagreements simply due to the thorough responses that Senator Biden had to Palin's accusations. But then I looked at factcheck.org.

It is a shame that this service is not widely used by the general public. It is deeply informative and well researched. Not only that, but entirely non-partisan. The factcheck page for the vice presidential debate is an interesting one. The candidates were both incredibly inaccurate and downright false on several of their comments. So how does the general election stage of a campaign legitimize the political system at all if our main source of information is false over 50% of the time? How can we claim the political system works if people vote using the trust built from false information?

To give a few examples, during the veep debates, Palin said outright that millions of small businesses would be affected by tax increases from Obama's administration. That number is only a few hundred thousand. Biden claimed that a comment from Palin about how he would sell clean coal to China was taken out of context. However, the context was fairly close to his actual comment, and there is still some disagreement as to what Biden originally meant. The misinformation available during the debate is startling.

When we think about challenger strategies in regards to offering misinformation, I can see no real correlation. The only one that comes close is attacking the record, but if the attacks are based on falsehood, then what strategies are you really using?

Sorry, are they strategies or tactics?