JOHN BRUMMETT: The new rule in politics

We only have to elect a president. We don't have to admire one.

These candidates are not anchor persons for major television networks, after all.

Hillary Clinton and Brian Williams basically committed the same hooey.

She said in 2008 that she had landed in Bosnia under sniper fire in 1996. It wasn't so, as video evidence proved. She explained with a typical scoff that she had misremembered and, to the apparent surprise of some, wasn't perfect.

Today she's a slight betting favorite to be the next president.

Williams, a glib teleprompter reader for NBC, crowed of having endured similar hairiness in Iraq. That wasn't so, either. He said he'd conflated some things.

He got suspended and then banished to the great unwatched on MSNBC.

So being full of it is less a problem in a president or presidential candidate than in a network reader of a newscast script.

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It makes sense that Williams faced a higher standard than Clinton. In the '70s we learned to trust Walter Cronkite but not Richard Nixon. There are vestiges of that prioritization, apparently.

For all the media's emphasis during a presidential race on character and trust, we wind up electing presidents who don't exhibit much character, or earn much trust.

Ronald Reagan said he wouldn't trade arms for hostages, then traded arms for hostages.

George H.W. Bush said for us to read his lips to be assured that there would be no new taxes. Then there were new taxes.

Bill Clinton said he did not have sexual relations with that woman. But he did.

George W. Bush said we needed to go to war with Saddam Hussein over what Osama bin Laden did.

All of that amounts to great news for Ben Carson, the sudden and unlikely Republican presidential front-runner.

He's an apparently talented neurosurgeon who rose from great disadvantage. Even then, he felt a need to jazz up his personal narrative with self-aggrandizing accounts of his own wonderfulness that reporters have investigated and found to be fabricated, exaggerated or unverifiable.

So Carson called a news conference and whined. He said the media never looked at anyone else so closely, which is utter nonsense.

Carson said the press was liberally biased. (That would explain why no one has ever written anything negative about the Clintons).

And Carson said no one in the media ever pressed Barack Obama for his college grades, which are private by law.

Carson's is a playground-worthy retort: "He did it, too. Why are you picking on me?"

Still, we need to stipulate that Carson could be a serial exaggerator and fabricator and be competent to cut on a brain. And a guy could be a wasteland of personal character and still do all right as president, as has been demonstrated.

The media's personal-character emphasis in modern politics started with Gary Hart in 1987. He was asked about reports of his extramarital activity. He denied any such thing and dared the media to follow him and endure boredom.

When he got caught, the media explained that his relevant flaw worthy of public consumption was not marital infidelity, but lying.

It proved to be a moot point. Clinton showed in the 1990s that he could get away with both extracurricular sexual activity and lying about it.

Now Clinton is seen as a world statesman and a president many people wouldn't mind having back.

A president receiving oral sex from an intern in the Oval Office and lying about it while a budget deficit gets replaced with a surplus that allows the federal debt to be paid down ... would you take that?

There are scores of reasons to oppose, indeed fear, Carson as president.

He wants to do away with Medicare. He believes the government should be shut down unless Obamacare is repealed. He says he'd charge toward a gunman doing mass shootings. He says Joseph of the Old Testament built the pyramids for grain storage.

But that he claims to have been offered a scholarship to West Point when he'd merely been encouraged to apply, and that CNN and the Wall Street Journal couldn't find old acquaintances to substantiate some of his autobiographical braggadocio ... that's not as relevant.

That's because there's a new rule in American politics, a new deflection, perhaps even a new advantage, to be applied when presidential candidates get revealed as full of it.

You blame the media for supposed bias. You say the other guy is also full of it.

You stir your supporters to send you more money to help you fight against the injustice of being held to a news anchorman's standard.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 11/10/2015

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