Politicians and their lies

Could something you have said really be a lie if someone has made you say it? Most of the time, if a politician lies, it’s partly our own fault. Especially if you agree that it’s not really a lie if we make them lie. The broader political situation really calls for a bit of maturity all round.

 

But I’m not talking about the standard lie, the statement by a politician that something won’t happen, and then they go about doing it anyway, or a broken promise of some sort. There’s a much bigger fraud being committed, the lie that politicians are all-knowing, and that they are in control of the government of their state or country.

While journalists focus on catching out politicians who lie, they miss this much bigger lie. It’s a myth that makes us misunderstand how our system of government works. We misunderstand the context, and so we misunderstand what government actions should be possible and what might be harder to achieve. It stops us from planning a better course of action.

Politicians aren’t as all-knowing as they pretend to be. They don’t have as much control over their departments as they would have us believe. These are the real things they lie to us about.

It prevents us from holding politicians accountable when we really need to, because we spend too much time berating them for things that aren’t really within their control. Instead we focus on things that, in the bigger picture, are relatively minor issues.

Sam, with her background as a lawyer and her knowledge of political history, is a smart person. Like anyone, she has her pet subjects of conversation and her areas of expertise. She is a competent person, but she isn’t an omniscient god. Let’s say we were to ask her a few questions.

 

Question 1:            What are the environmental impacts of a very large fishing boat on the Great Barrier Reef? Are they significant, and what are you going to do about it?

Question 2:            Can you tell me what was wrong with the Aboriginal intervention? What do you think about the Northern Territory Chief Minister’s plan for change this week?

Question 3:            Do you agree with the proposal for a separate economic zone in northern Queensland?

Question 4:            What should the Australian Defence Force be doing to be more successful in the war in Afghanistan? Is this affected by the recent sexual assault scandals at the Defence Force Academy?

 

Could Sam be expected to know actual answers to these questions? What about if she were asked for a solution to world peace and the world hunger problem? What is more likely is that she is aware of the scripted responses to some of the above questions that represent the government’s position, which she can parrot when necessary.

You’re probably thinking that these questions are so varied, that it isn’t realistic. Perhaps not, but take them as exaggerated examples of the many and varied questions that Sam actually is required to answer on a daily basis. Even if the questions Sam is asked are within a narrow range, she is still asked lots of them.

Think about this. Hypothetically, if Sam was asked those four questions, what do you think she would say? Could she possibly have good answers to them all? For me, I think I would be confident in giving an answer or opinion on the third question, about an economic proposition in an area of my own expertise in my own home state. To be honest, I know the basics of arguments about the environment, aboriginal affairs issues, and the Afghanistan war. I’m not ignorant, and I follow these matters in the news, but I’m no expert on them. Are you an expert on them all? Could anyone be an expert on them all?

Sam may not be asked a variety of questions as wide as this, but politicians who are the head of their government, such as Prime Ministers and Presidents, often are asked all sorts of questions. How do you think they should go about it?

For a time, Sam was the Transport Minister. Consider these questions, which are of the sort that might normally be asked by a journalist.

 

Question 1:            A report has found the railway line between Sydney and Melbourne is in poor shape, and maintenance funding has been neglected for decades. Why hasn’t your government fixed the problem?

Question 2:            Residents in Geraldton are saying that the new highway upgrade project there will involve clearing 2000 trees, will affect tourism and cause a threat to wildlife such as koalas. Why is the government going ahead with the project?

Question 3:            There were 2 deaths in an accident yesterday at a section of the Princes Highway, where there have been crashes before. Why hasn’t the road been fixed?

 

 

Would Sam have exact information and knowledge about every road crash in the last year that has occurred? About every inch of railway track and every roadworks site in the country? Sam’s main role is to approve projects, to accept advice from her departmental officials and check that they have followed a proper process before approving construction. She can ask questions. But she won’t have time to personally visit every road project between Broome and Hobart.

I wonder whether journalists are a bit unrealistic about how much control over and knowledge about projects Sam and other politicians have within their department. The truth is, politicians don’t manage and have their say on everything. There’s a common saying that ‘the buck stops with the Minister’. While it’s true, in a technical sense, that ministers are ultimately accountable, to be fair we really need to stop and think about their real role in the overall government system. There are too many things going on in government departments for ministers to have full control over all of them. Most things are delegated down to a certain level or area within government departments.

Perhaps the issue at hand is how Sam should respond to these questions. Should she be offended by the accusation that a fatal crash has occurred, and that as Minster she is responsible because bad road conditions in the area weren’t fixed? If she is put that question, will she aggressively defend herself? Will she defend the amount of money spent every year on fixing roads? What if it is found out that the road was planned to be fixed but it was delayed or the project was mismanaged? Will Sam accept responsibility and resign? Should she?

I have seen Sam talk at community forums, and to people individually. I have heard her interviewed. I know she goes into meetings with political opponents and other people. And she is always a woman of steel.

There is often a group of people waiting for the arrival of Sam before a meeting. People get there early. When she arrives she is accompanied by one or two staff members. She walks in confidently, in a nonchalant manner. She takes over the meeting, and her presence dominates. She gets asked tough questions but she uses her position to show she is the one who understands the situation and is in control.

In truth, there’s a lot of posturing. I can imagine Sam being in negotiations in Parliament House with other politicians and in cabinet meetings with other minsters. In one respect, she is competing with them. She would never show her weakness. She will never say that she doesn’t know something, even if it’s right outside her area of expertise or knowledge. She always knows. A politician who doesn’t know looks weak.

It’s not the truth, though, is it? The next time you watch an interview with a government minister, think about what they have probably actually done that day. Sam’s day often involves a lot of travelling and reading briefs and other documents from her department. She might have time for two or three meetings, maybe a press conference. She also has to eat, and at night she has to sleep. She doesn’t actually find out the details of every single tiny aspect of what her department is doing; she takes advice from her staff and senior bureaucrats.

She is one person at the head of a department with 1000s of people working in it. She has other responsibilities besides being the Minister of the department.

Sam doesn’t personally make every single decision in a department. Yet she acts kind of like she does. She portrays an image that says she is the one in control. She has to look in control. Journalists and members of the public seem to think that she is in control of everything.

This has one dangerous consequence. If something goes wrong, it therefore appears like it is the minister’s fault. If something isn’t being done, it must be because the minister doesn’t have the political will to fix it. But that is ridiculous. Opposition politicians blame individual politicians like Sam for everything and anything, because it wins them political points. It’s a simplistic story that we all latch onto. If something goes wrong, the minister is to blame because of their incompetence. Simple.

Or is it? An interesting example of this is the demotion of former Australian environment minister Peter Garrett, following deaths as a result of the implementation of the Australian Government’s home ceiling insulation subsidies program. It was said that the deaths were caused by companies involved in ceiling insulation that were not training their employees in safety standards well enough, and because the government was not overseeing the process properly.

Would those failures be the fault of Minister Garrett? Who else’s fault might they be? What could the minister actually do to prevent the situation? In an opinion piece by Miranda Devine in the Sydney Morning Herald on February 23 2010, Garrett was said to have

become the ritual sacrifice, no less than a Mayan virgin, on the altar of high stakes politics.⁹

 

Minister Garrett did get a demotion. The online version of the story in the paper also shows a video clip of departmental officials being questioned about the Minister’s role in the overseeing of the policy implementation.⁹

Interestingly, although Minister Garrett was demoted, it seems that he wasn’t actually negligent at all, that he did a good job in the circumstances. Some time after the demotion it was leaked to the media that Minister Garrett was quite forthright about his safety concerns when discussing the matter with other ministers in Cabinet, but that his concerns were overlooked, because of the economic need to have the insulation program implemented fast and money spent quickly to help prevent a recession.

The Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, by being forced for political reasons to demote Minister Garrett, has unfortunately helped reinforce the view that everything in the government that goes wrong is a minster’s fault. Is it a lie to perpetuate the illusion that ministers like Sam and Garrett are in full control of all circumstances, that they make every decision themselves without relying on being advised by others, that they are completely knowledgeable about every situation and everything that happens?

Yes, it is a lie. A convenient lie that politicians are forced to perpetuate, because the second they are honest, the second they even appear to look like they do not know the answer to a question immediately, they are portrayed as incompetent and weak.

So it is a lie that they are forced to tell. But I would still prefer them to tell the truth, to be honest about what their actual role is within the government and within their departments.

But maybe they also lie to themselves. I once heard Sam give a speech to a private group of academics and other people interested in the functioning of the parliamentary committee system. Sam spoke at length about the important role of parliamentary committees in scrutinising proposed legislation. But although this may be true, there’s something about how Sam spoke that made me think that not even she really understands her role in the process.

Sam asks questions here or there about legislation that is drafted, but most of them are of marginal importance. It’s the government bureaucrats like Peter and me that actually write the legislation. That’s who gives the advice about whether it will be effective, that’s who writes the actual thing. In the community there seems to be a misconception that ‘parliament makes laws’. Well, thinking practically about how busy Sam is, you know that it isn’t true. Politicians in parliament give approval or non-approval to laws by voting for them or against them. But, for most laws, politicians come right at the end of the long process. It’s bureaucrats that draft most legislation, and this gives them a lot of influence. Politicians are usually just a rubber stamp.

Is Sam delusional about her level of influence over the legislating process? I think so. In truth, she is more passive than she realises. People give her pieces of paper and ask her to sign. She can decline to sign, and she can ask questions, which she often does. But her time is limited in doing this, and for practical purposes she mostly has to trust that her department is doing all of the background research properly. Listening to Sam, she seems to think that she runs the whole thing, that she’s in charge. She certainly isn’t. In theory she is in charge, but in reality she can intervene from time to time in a limited number of matters, but that’s it.

Sam also relies on bureaucrats to tell her how much money each project should cost, and how much money should be allocated to various things. Sam can question this, but she has to put a fair amount of trust in the departmental bureaucrats. A typical departmental budget has thousands of items of expenditure and is many pages long. Does Sam personally get out her calculator and make sure it all adds up? Does she log on to her computer and open up the big excel spread sheet and start putting it all together herself?

One of the real powers that Sam has is the ability to change organisational structures. If she thinks that emergency management planning needs to be given more focus in her department, she can set up a new division of the department. Or she can get an independent person to make a review of projects, and ask for recommended changes. Many of the changes that Sam will be able to make will involve setting up new structures, such as new departmental divisions or units, or appointing a new senior bureaucrat with the authority to oversee a new process, or employing new staff to take on a new project, or requiring that a project be done in-house or externally by tender.

One of the main things that politicians do in response to identified problems, to make it look like they are taking action, is to change or invent a new organisational structure.

 

Why is important to understand that it is a lie that Sam and other ministers have control over their departments? Because otherwise we will misdiagnose the problems with government processes. If government policies are ineffective, or if money is wasted, we simplistically blame the minister, or the Prime Minister, or the government generally. Then we try to hold them personally accountable, and the people that might actually be responsible are not held accountable. We might blame politicians sometimes when the problem is something else. We won’t ever get to understanding or fixing that problem. We might get hysterical, rather than practical.

In Australia, during the 2010 election, Prime Minister Julia Gillard stated ‘There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead.’ There’s one particular clip from a television interview that many Australians know well, because it has been re-broadcast over and over again. The Prime Minister, instead of a straight tax, was proposing a trading scheme where carbon polluters would be required to purchase tradable carbon credit licences, a system which has also been introduced in Europe. Gillard even promised to engage the community to try to develop a consensus about how to implement a carbon trading system, through ‘citizens’ assemblies’.

Of course, the inevitable happened. The election turned up something unexpected for Australia: a hung parliament. The Labor Party was forced to form a quasi-coalition to stay in government, and this necessarily involved a few compromises on policy. Without abandoning the commitment to a trading system, the Prime Minster was forced into a compromise to create a transition to the system that had the price fixed rather than floating according to market demand in the first instance, with the floating price coming three years later. You have to admit, it sounds like a straight out tax, and ever since then political opponents have called the Prime Minister a liar, or someone who breaks promises.

Is this anything more than rhetoric? Answer: no. No politician can actually make promises to the public to introduce a new policy, law, system, or funding proposal. The only way they could do that would be if the country was a dictatorship. All a politician can do is state what their party’s policies are. In the Westminster system, the party of government is only the party that has the most votes in parliament. It doesn’t have all the votes in parliament. It doesn’t even necessarily have a majority of votes in parliament. In the American political system, a presidential candidate such as Barack Obama can announce a policy of providing universal health insurance, but even if he is elected president he can only make it a reality if it is supported by a majority of the votes in congress. The Australian system requires all laws to also be passed by the senate, which is not normally controlled by the party in government alone, although the senate doesn’t often block the government’s proposed budget and spending proposals.

Two high-profile examples of the elected head of government being unable to implement their exact policies include, in America, when Barack Obama had to negotiate to pass his budget in 2011, and in Australia, when the Labor government was unable to get their original carbon emissions trading system legislation passed by the Australian Senate in 2009.

Politicians like Sam can’t make promises, they can only state what their policies are. In dictatorships promises can be made, but in democracies politicians have to get support for their policies via the mechanism of the democratic decision-making process. This support is not always guaranteed.

Failing to take this into consideration often leads the media to exaggerate claims about lies or broken promises, and distracts us from mature democratic discussion. It therefore has an impact on our ability to keep politicians properly accountable.

Did Prime Minister Gillard break her promise not to introduce a carbon tax? Not really. At the least we should say that the situation is more complex. If Gillard had full control and power, as a dictator does, she would have implemented her original policy, a market-based emissions trading system. But she didn’t have the power to do this, because she is not a dictator, and it was not accepted by the parliament that voters elected.

In the 2010 election, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott promised there would be ‘no carbon tax, ever’ if he was elected. Well, like Gillard, he was elected to parliament. Has he not kept his promise to voters who voted for him? Of course he has not broken a promise, he has advocated strongly for his position, but his party does not have a dictator’s power to get its own way because it doesn’t have enough votes in parliament. The Prime Minister, Gillard, is in a similar situation: her party does not control parliament. While it is entirely legitimate for parties to promote their policies before an election, the reality is, even if they are elected to be the government, they are not dictators and do not have full control of the parliament.

In Australia, the Greens are a minor party in the federal parliament. Each election they announce many policies, on the environment, economics, education and other matters. Should we castigate them because many of their policy ideas haven’t been realised in parliament. Have they broken promises to their voters by not implementing those policies? If they have to compromise with other political parties to get their policy ideas accepted, can we say that they have broken their commitments? Have they lied to us?

In one sense Gillard did lie. She said that no government she led would introduce a carbon tax. But the big lie here is the fact that she has implied that if she is the Prime Minister she will be like a dictator who will have her own way on everything. She can’t promise that. Before elections parties can say, hypothetically, what policies they support and would like to implement. But our parliamentary system of democracy is designed in such a way that majority support from the members of parliament is required to pass laws. Politicians are, in a way, lying to us when they say that their policies will be strictly implemented in parliament. They can’t promise that.

Imagine again that you’re Sam. Before parliament you had a background as a lawyer. Or you might have been teacher, or in the retail sector, or had other experience. Now you’ve just been made the minister in the government responsible for transport. If you’re lucky you will know a little bit about the transport sector. You might know nothing, but you certainly won’t know everything.

Immediately you are required to sign off on multiple decisions on a daily basis. You also have to be in parliament on days when parliament sits. You also have responsibilities back in your electorate. You might have media interviews, or school visits, or other events. You could be working from your home city, or from Canberra, or be in any of the other states for a meeting of some sort. Several people from different media sources will have contacted your office with requests for comments about this or that. You will have your own priorities for your department, things that you want to meet with other people about. You’ll have to keep in touch with news media reports to make sure you’re kept informed. You will have family commitments. You also have to eat and sleep at some stage. There might be a lot of time spent travelling.

You’ll be busy.

Take this example, and think about it for a second. Google the transport department’s internet site in your state or country. How much time are you going to budget for in your day today to make decisions about vehicle imports, or about  TravelSECURE (you may have to allow some time for learning what this actually is)? How much time will you spend casting your eyes over the budget of each business unit in your department? If you only have one department that you’re responsible for, you’re lucky. How much time will you devote to overseeing programs related to child safety around cars?

More to the point: how will you decide which of these things is relatively more important than others, and needs more time? Will you decide on a whim?

But not only is it a myth that politicians have enough time on their hands to actually have significant control over decisions that are made, they also don’t have enough time to know all of the details about what’s going on. The standard process is for public servants to ‘brief’ politicians about ‘hot issues’ (issues that are deemed to be important). Of course, public servants face multiple choices here, and can’t tell politicians everything. In most cases, most decisions made by departmental ministers are rubber stamps of decisions made at a lower level. And remember, just as politicians are busy, so are all of the senior people in government departments; they, themselves, take advice from further down the chain.

What politicians like Sam can do is set agendas and directions. They can hire people of their choice and delegate to them, and try their best to make sure they are accountable. But what proportion of politicians do you think are successful at this? And would they be totally successful? Are all politicians brilliant, or do some have mediocre skills only?

If you were a politician, would it be easy for you to  hold someone accountable for results, if you are so run off your feet that you have to have other people plan your daily routine, and if you rely on advice about whether the results are good or not? How on Earth would you know if the delivery of the Bruce Highway upgrade project was going well? How would you know whose fault it was if it wasn’t?

If you had an idea, something you wanted your department to do, how would you make it happen? Would you know how the process works and who is responsible? How would you know how the costs are calculated or what options there are? You ask for advice, and other people carry out the tasks while you are out of view. If you were told ‘Sorry minister, that’s not possible’, what would or could you do about it?

Many or most politicians may do a good job at this, but how much control do you think they really have? In short, they don’t have a lot of control at all. In conversations with ministers and their staffers, I have heard it said that the minister has a small amount of time to concentrate on a few pet issues that they would like progressed, and their ability to influence the overall department is limited.

Consider another example. Last year your country’s economic growth rate was 5 per cent, and the unemployment rate was 5 per cent. Now this year’s figures have been released and the growth rate is 2 per cent, and the unemployment rate has risen to 6 per cent. Is this the fault of the government? Were the good results last year because of good government policies or actions? Think of a politician for a minute. Do they claim credit for economic results, or blame another politician for bad economic results?

America has more than 310 million people. About half of them are working in jobs in the economy, or running businesses themselves. The president of America is one person. One person out of 150 million-odd people who are working. Do you think the president, or the government generally, controls 150 million atomistic businesspeople and workers?

Economic policy is one area where politicians exploit the myth that politicians are responsible for good or bad economic outcomes. Sure, they have an impact, and can influence outcomes. But if it was all due to politicians’ decisions, then you would expect different countries to be experiencing good or bad results, based upon how good the politicians in those countries were. But what actually happens is that countries all over the world will rise or fall together, boom and bust together, and experience challenges together. Politicians have a lot less impact on the economy than they usually claim, especially in the short or medium term.

If any politician claims that any good or bad economic result, within less than at least 5 years, is a result of action or lack of action by a government, is lying. In fact, anything less than 10 years is unlikely to be a direct result of politicians' actions, depending on the circumstances. A handful of elected politicians, even if they boss around their departments, just don’t have that much control over free individuals in free market economies. If they did exert control, it would be a socialist economy.

Interestingly, I can’t ever remember a politician making this point. They always try to spin an interpretation of events that gives them credit or blames their opponents.

This is why government policies don’t always work. Politicians and other actors within the political system simply don’t have that level of control.

More importantly, politicians will often lie by over-exaggerating and over-promising to voters what they can achieve. The reality is that they don’t have as much power or ability to make changes as they claim.

Barack Obama provides an example. On the one hand, he made big promises before his presidential election in 2008. On the other hand, when changes that he sought to make proved difficult, because of a congress that resisted his policies or otherwise, we shouldn’t be too critical. It’s true that, even if you’re the president of the United States of America, known as the most powerful person in the world, you don’t always have enough power to do everything you want or promise to do.

 

There is another instance in which politicians lie. They don’t tell us what they really think about us. Economic or scientific experts often think they are superior to the everyday members of the community. The most alarming thing I have witnessed is how contemptuous some experts and politicians are of voters that they think are non-experts.

This can be dangerous. The expert that thinks they know everything will become a fanatical supporter of some academic theory, and will ignore evidence from real world situations. Economists, for example, will adhere to a dogmatic assertion that free markets are best, even in situations where that may not be so. For example, many communities in rural and regional areas have experienced a decline in their populations and the vitality of their towns, because of the whims of market forces.

There’s a certain tone of voice that people use when they talk to you patronisingly. I know it very well because, often having unconventional opinions, I am spoken to like I’m an idiot most days of my life at some point. I can sense someone talking to me patronisingly quickly.

If there’s a reason why members of the community hate politicians so much, it could be a subconscious response to the fact that politicians often treat us with contempt.

 

Nobody knows everything. The treasury minister or secretary doesn’t know all the answers about how to produce a brilliantly rich economy. No person knows how to easily reduce global hunger or poverty; they might claim to know the causes, but they don’t know how to change the current politics of the world to make it end. No politician knows every last detail of complex medical surgery, or which area of medical research should be granted funds over others.

          The lower the status of the politician, and the lower their actual knowledge or skills, the more likely it is that they will talk at great length about topics they know little about. I found this to be the case when talking to candidates running around Ipswich in the 2012 Queensland parliamentary elections. The quality of people nominated as candidates was exceptionally low. Very few of the candidates had any experience of politics or skills in policymaking. One candidate I met initially didn’t know the name of the electorate that she lived in. Like many candidates, she nominated for an electorate she didn’t even live in.

          Regardless of the party, I’ve almost never heard a politician say, ‘I don’t know.’ I’ve also never heard a politician say, in response to a problem, ‘No, we don’t think we can solve your problem. Sorry.’ It just never happens. For politicians to say they don’t know is taken by others as an admission of failure, or that they are uninformed or unknowledgeable. Yet, if when asked about the solution to complex problems, are they not lying in some sense when they bluff knowledge about the topic? Are they not giving us false hopes that a solution is possible and that they can deliver it? Are they not lying outright, promising things they can’t be sure of? I think so.

Annabel Crabb, an Australian Broadcasting Corporation political commentator, made a similar point in 2011, in a column called Political protagonists and the pretend of certainty:

In all the human geography encompassed by the great and complex questions of our time (How can we best help the planet while others continue to damage it? How do we plan a secure economic future in a globe whose balance of power is tipping so swiftly? What are the obligations we owe to a child, and how do we best honour them as our notions of family change?), it seems there is no home address for hesitation.¹⁰

 

The flip side of claiming too much ability or credit for yourself is to blame opponents too much. Many of the economic, social or other problems in our society are strictly out of the politicians’ control. When opponents blame each other for negative outcomes, such as a rise in inflation or unemployment, or claim credit when the reverse happens on their watch, it is largely a lie. A lie that encourages us all to over-estimate what actually can be achieved by governments in a set amount of time.

Politicians lie to us by pretending that they know the answers to all problems, and by exaggerating their ability to deliver solutions. They promise to fix things so that they will get elected to parliament, but it’s often a lie because they don’t always have the knowledge or power to make it happen. Of course, it doesn’t stop them from thinking that they know best, and trying to implement their solution.

Too often, big-headed politicians who think they know best try to play catch-up with their fraudulent promises. And it often doesn’t work, which is why these lies and exaggerations are one of the top ten reasons why governments don’t fix problems that we want them to, or why they take far too long or too much money.

 

 

 

Key points: ·         Journalists’ gotcha tactics force politicians into lying about their level of expertise and their actual power vis-à-vis their departments. This leads politicians to exaggerate what it is possible to achieve. ·         No government minister can be an expert on everything or know everything. Knowledge is power, and politicians don’t always have perfect knowledge. ·         Despite this, politicians never say ‘I don’t know’. Journalists and opposing politicians would never let them get away with it, because politics is all about posturing and image. ·        Ministers can’t control everything in their departments and everything that’s technically within their area of responsibility. They rely on delegating power down and on advice and information from public servants. Not everything bad that happens in the public sector is the government’s or the minister’s fault. This causes us to mistreat the real problems why public policy often doesn’t work. ·        Politicians can’t make promises, they can only state what their policies are and what they would like to do in they can. We don’t vote politicians in to become dictators. ·        It is a myth that government controls the whole economy and that good or bad economic circumstances are only because of good or bad government policies. Unless you’ve living in a planned, socialist economy, of course. ·        Politicians don’t tell us what they really think of us, and often treat voters and the public like unintelligent pieces of dog poo. ·        Most politicians seem to be genuinely unaware of the limits of their own knowledge, ability and power.

 

Possible reforms or ideas: ·        Stop exalting politicians and expecting them to provide instant solutions to every problem. Don’t trust politicians who seem like they know everything. ·        Journalists should start researching other causes of bad government policy outcomes, rather than accepting the simplistic view of political opponents that it’s all the government’s fault. ·        Ministers should be more honest about their actual role, as a way to drive re-engagement with voters and citizens. We all know that lying gets you into more trouble.