Why politicians tell all those lies

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 23, 1998 | by Stephen Goode

Says Fick, "Children who grow up in disturbed homes, such as the president did, often display behavior designed to cover that individual's true feelings about family life and themselves.

"The individual strives to protect these secrets at any and all costs, and the means they use to do so is to deny anything unpleasant and at times to lie outright," he explains. "In essence, they learn to lie to themselves as well as to others" to disguise or hide the harsh reality of their everyday lives at home.

"Even within their homes, secrets abound, promises are broken. There's a creation of a false reality. When children grow up in these alcoholic homes, they never know what's going to happen one day to the next," Fick continues. "When someone grows up in that environment they learn to react to people. They learn to be reactive individuals rather than active ones," which means they wait to see how they think the person next to them wants them to behave and behave in that way rather than genuinely to manipulate others.

Fick notes that others have emphasized the atmosphere of lies that surrounds and engulfs children in alcoholic homes, and indeed they have. Janet Gerringer Woititz, in her classic Adult Children of Alcoholics, for example, describes such homes as likely to produce the con artist: "The con artist can genarally get away with it for a while. This, too, is what he learns at home." Interestingly, she adds: "But manipulation doesn't work forever. Others stop being fooled."

Clinton's difficult early home life thus may shed some light on us current behavior. But observers of contemporary American life say there may be another reason behind the tendency of men and women in public life to stretch the truth: It's easier to do so now and get away with it.

What's notable about Clinton's image is that the public clearly recognizes its "inconsistency with what an ideal president should be" -- honest trustworthy, solid -- but they don't care, says Kathleen Watters, a professor of communications at the University of Dayton who specializes in political images.

"The public isn't dumb. But it is willing to accept the dissonance between the ideal image" and the image they have of what Clinton really is -- a man who has lied and been unfaithful to his wife -- and "to live with that image" and not get worked up about it. Ronald Reagan "got dubbed the `Teflon president,' but Clinton has bested him on that," Watters says, yet the public doesn't mind, and that "is the significant point."

Watters believes peace and, above all, economic prosperity make the public more tolerant of Clinton's far-from-perfect image. But she says that Clinton enjoys an easygoing characterization among Americans because the country has been inundated in recent years with stories of John F. Kennedy's infidelities and the peccadilloes of other presidents. "They're ad over our screens," whether TV or Internet, she says -- and we no longer expect anyone to live up to a larger-than-life presidential image. Indeed, we expect quite the opposite.