David McElroy

The re-election of Barack Obama honestly stunned many conservatives. They could understand some people being confused enough to vote for Obama four years ago, but as they watched his actions during his first term, they were certain that most people saw the same danger they saw.

Now those conservatives are left confused and scared of what’s next. Mostly, though, many of the conservatives I know are trying to figure out what went wrong. How is it that what was so plain to them wasn’t plain to a majority in the country?

Deep down, most people believe that other reasonable and intelligent people are like them. It makes sense on some level. If you assume that you’re intelligent, informed and reasonable, you assume that similar people would come to similar conclusions. And if they don’t come to similar conclusions, well, they’re not very bright. Or they’re ill-informed. Or biased. Or unreasonable. Somehow, there’s something wrong with them.

Conservatives have believed that they were in the majority for years. Even during the tumultuous ’60s, Richard Nixon told conservatives that they were the “silent majority.” In the ’70s, the Rev. Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority to become a political force for social conservatives. In both of these names, you see the assumption that the majority are obviously “with us.”

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Have you seen this chart being posted by various people in the last week? It purports to show that Barack Obama has issued more than 900 executive orders during his first term, which is said to be wildly out of proportion to every other president who’s used them.

The point is to show that Obama is ruling by fiat. He’s going around Congress and ruling more like a king. It looks pretty scary. The only problem is that it’s a lie. Everything about it is made up.

Here’s a look at the real numbers. Obama has actually issued 138 executive orders. George W. Bush had 173 during his first term, by comparison. Various other presidents have issued hundreds of them. Franklin Roosevelt actually issued more than 3,000 during his four terms, instead of the 11 that the chart gives him credit for.

As you know, I don’t care for Obama or any other president. You can imagine how happy I am about any executive order. But the facts of what Obama and other presidents have done is bad enough. There’s no reason to make things up. When people make up lies to support their attacks on politicians, they’re only hurting themselves in the long run.

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I still remember the first political mailer I did that made me feel completely slimy. In 1998, I was doing work for an incumbent Alabama governor. I had played a minor role in the campaign, but I’d handled a few mail pieces and had made some nice money. At the last moment, the state party came to me and wanted one more mail piece to go out to a lot of households, something like 300,000 or so.

The guy I had done the work for was about to lose. This mail piece was to be an attack to try to hurt the challenger at the last second, after it was too late for him to respond. The pitch was simple. The Democratic challenger had somehow been vaguely and briefly associated with somebody who was a ’60s radical. So I was supposed to tie the challenger to a collection of something like five or six anti-war protesters from the ’60s, even though there was no connection in real life.

I don’t remember how I worded the piece, exactly. I remember that it looked nice and it was clever in the way it implied the challenger was one of those people — people such as “Hanoi Jane” Fonda, whose picture was included, of course. If you just looked at the card briefly, you would assume that the fine print must surely have exposed the challenger as an awful, evil radical who was a danger to us all. But it did nothing of the kind, because that wasn’t true. It never quite said anything inaccurate. The copy and photos just implied it.

I don’t remember too much more about that piece, but I do recall that I pocketed $10,000 in profit from that last-second job. It’s the kind of slimy, unethical thing that’s done every election — by people in both major parties — but it was the beginning of the end for my ability to stick around. The money helped, but it wasn’t enough to keep me from feeling that I’d done something very, very wrong.

It’s 14 years later, and someone else here in the state did something that was similarly very, very wrong this week. I don’t know who was paid to produce this piece. All I know is that it’s a lie. You might be interested in looking at how such lies work.

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