“Is a ‘Fib your way to Congress’ trend emerging?”
We’re now seeing a steady trickle of reports that Rep. George Santos (R-NY) does not stand alone in Congress as lying about who he is and about the image presented to voters.
At the same time, there are reports about inappropriate snooping into candidate backgrounds in apparent search of political one-upmanship.
Do we even care about whether our would-be leaders are truthful about the one subject they presumably know best? Why can’t the leaders in Congress understand that as voters we might be more distressed by being treated like sheep than by their need to hold onto a majority?
Santos clearly has compiled a thick dossier of questionable claims about his own background that have put him at legal risk – even the risk of criminal charges – as well as disdain for the process. Even Republican backers in his Long Island district want him erased from this Congress or politics altogether, though Santos himself seems to enjoy the limelight of notoriety while banking his congressional salary.
Now we’re hearing there are more such cases of outright lying.
Per The Washington Post, we now have learned that freshman Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.), the first Mexican American woman to represent Florida in Congress, used to say she was Middle Eastern, Jewish, or Eastern European – and a Barack Obama supporter. She claimed an impoverished upbringing in Southern California at odds with the accounts of family and friends, and survived an armed robbery that no records appear to back up.
A Tennessee television station told us that another new Republican congressman from that state, Rep. Andy Ogles, is not an economist as claimed, was a reserve sheriff’s deputy rather than a lifelong lawman cracking down on sex trafficking and had inflated his participation in non-degree classes at Vanderbilt and Dartmouth into claims of having attended their graduate schools.
“Is a ‘Fib your way to Congress’ trend emerging?” asks Jack Schafer, press gadfly, who both questions whether journalists are doing enough checking of candidates and whether voters care.
Too Far the Other Way
Meanwhile, Politico outlined the tale of two former House Republican candidates in Nevada and Pennsylvania who say the Air Force alerted them this month that their military records were improperly released during the midterm campaign to a former research director for Democratic groups, who had requested them as a check on employment and benefits.
The Air Force said Abraham Payton of Due Diligence Group and a research director for American Bridge, a Democratic group, requested data about military records as a check on employment and benefits. Sam Peters and Kevin Dellicker are the fourth and fifth identified of 11 recipients of such Air Force letters, including Reps. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) and Zach Nunn (R-Iowa), over inappropriate records releases, which have sparked an investigation by House Republicans. According to Federal Election Commission records, the Democratic Congressional Campaign folks paid Due Diligence just over $110,000 between January 2021 and December 2022.
Just how military records fit in is not clear, except as a search for potential over-statement of achievement.
Details aside, it seems that poking around in candidates’ pasts has some limits as well.
We’re not even sure that any of it has a practical fallout once surfaced other than to give one side or the other ammunition to say that the opponents are morally bankrupt.
We understand that the egos of politicians on both sides of the aisle run ahead of humility or full disclosures about backgrounds that may differ from their campaign profiles. You don’t hear Joe Biden talking about how he once plagiarized a British politician’s speech or stretched the truth about being arrested trying to visit Nelson Mandela, or Donald Trump acknowledging that he committed a laundry list of unethical, self-aggrandizing, or even illegal activities.
Does It Matter?
As Schafer asks, “Have candidates always embellished their pasts and gotten away with it until the Internet made it cheap and speedy to check their records? Or does this mini-epidemic of resume packing and fictionalized autobiographies point to something more revelatory — that everybody does it and accurate resumes and personal histories don’t matter when it comes to electing politicians?”
Schafer notes that we’ve been accustomed to ego-building claims by business and academic leaders and celebrities generally without tearing our hair out over the custom. One enduring lesson of The Great Gatsby novel, he notes, is teaches that if you can’t make it, fake it, and nobody will be any the wiser by the time you succeed.
“Trump established that while journalists care about the truth, voters can be more forgiving,” writes Schafer. “If voters cared that much about campaign lies, the Democrats would have made the 2020 election an exercise in public shaming about Trump’s lies. But they didn’t. The only lies politicians must avoid are the ones that might trigger legal proceedings against them,” like bad campaign finance filings.
Still, it rankles that no one except a local Long Island news outlet even bothered to look closely at Santos. It remains an unmet responsibility of journalists – and voters – to examine a candidate’s record.
These days we seem fixated on the team colors with which candidates and officials adorn themselves than on the quality of the person running. For that matter, if it no longer matters, why do candidates insist on egotistically puffing up their resume for voters who don’t seem to care.
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