What Voters Need Is Truth, Not Hype

Even as you read these words, 27-year-olds with marketing degrees are sitting at computer consoles in faraway cities, editing commercials designed to scare you out of your wits.

To save you time so you can enjoy the summer just a while longer, here’s a sneak preview of their messages: Republicans are a pack of Jerry Falwell clones who want to pillage the environment, ruin Medicare and cut taxes for country clubbers and big corporations. Democrats are a pack of pot-smoking ACLU lawyers who want to give condoms to school children, enlarge the government-bureaucracy unions and destroy free enterprise with regulations and taxes. Are not. Are too. Are not …

Spokane area voters got a taste of this coming barrage when Big Labor trotted out an attack ad against the Spokane area’s congressman. The AFL-CIO, whose $35 million campaign to oust Republicans is funded mostly with mandatory union dues, aired an ad inferring that Rep. George Nethercutt is allied with a supposed push by House Speaker Newt Gingrich to attack Medicare and the little old ladies who need it.

The ad is bilge. And it will be a surprise if special-interest groups on the Republican side don’t commit similar infractions in months to come. That’s because attack ads work - or so candidates are told by the slick marketers who run campaigns these days.

Here’s a suggestion, for voters who’d like to fight back: Every time you see an attack ad, doubt it. Chalk it up as a demerit against the side that used it.

Sure, criticism’s a valid part of political debate. But what we really need are candidates with the courage to offer tough, constructive reform.

Take Medicare, for example. A truthful candidate would tell you, as Medicare’s trustees did the other day, that Medicare is operating in the red and requires reform, soon. Both Democrats and Republicans know this, and both want reform. Nethercutt, like others in the GOP, has pushed for greater efficiency as part of an attempt to make Medicare viable. The real debate between the parties is over rate of change and details of policy, not the degree to which politicans care about little old ladies.

It is irresponsible to punish politicians for tackling difficult, justifiable reform - whether it’s the GOP pressing to reform and save Medicare, or Clinton pressing for better access to general health care.

So turn your back, or at least a wary eye, on negative ads, which often exaggerate and distort. Look for candidates who respect you enough to offer frank, constructive solutions to problems that concern you.

, DataTimes MEMO: The published text called this column Our Turn instead of Our View.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board