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This attitude may be more important than anything any candidate has said to date. Sissela Bok, a philosopher and the author of Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (1978), believes public veracity has been going downhill in the years since her book was published. Says she: "I couldn't believe that we would soon see something like Watergate again. But I do think that the Iran-contra and B.C.C.I. scandals were in many ways much more international. They covered much larger territories and involved a great many people." And Bok says the proliferation of such frauds has seriously frayed the social fabric: "Now, there is something strange and peculiar: people take for granted that they can't trust the government."
Such mistrust has erupted in cycles. Jimmy Carter, who won the White House in 1976 with the promise "I'll never lie to the American people," probably met a higher standard of truthfulness in office than any other President since Woodrow Wilson. "After Watergate," says Carter's former press secretary, Jody Powell, "whether or not you were telling the truth seemed to be of considerable importance. But now it almost doesn't seem to get attention paid to it anymore." Part of the reason may be that the kind of goody-goody idealism that motivated Carter's truthfulness also made him a spectacularly ineffectual leader in the world of hardball politics.
The public may now assume lying on the part of its representatives because it expects them to lie. Clinton himself reflected this cynical view recently, when he whimsically entertained reporters with his laws of politics, including this one: "Nearly everyone will lie to you, given the right circumstances."
Can the truth survive in the current marketplace of ideas amid the splintering of old coalitions and the proliferation of hot-button issues? Today's electorate seems an archipelago of special interests -- abortion, gun control, taxes, the environment -- offering no prospect of bridge-building compromises. Thus winning over one group risks alienating the others, a situation that encourages candidates to tell each constituency what it wants to hear and puts a premium on hedging the truth.
In this new geography, the nature of the presidency itself seems embattled. Americans have never cheered the arrival of a proven liar in the White House, but they have also given the Chief Executive generous leeway when it came to telling part, or almost none, of the truth. During the cold war, Presidents were allowed to lie when national security could plausibly be invoked. But now that the Soviet Union has collapsed, this exemption is gone.
Presidents were also allowed to lie when they appealed to cherished national beliefs and mythologies. George Bush's orchestration of the 1991 Gulf War was an inspired and inspiring example of this dispensation. The central truth of Desert Storm was not the peril of freedom-loving Kuwaitis or the delusions of a tin-pot Middle Eastern despot. The Gulf War was fought over oil and the West's continued access to it. As reasons for waging war go, this was rather good: a national interest was threatened, and a military response met the immediate threat. But almost no one wanted to say or hear that young American lives were being put at risk for a commodity. Hence the successful collusion in mythmaking between the leaders and the led.