Favorability contest

I still remember in junior-high math being introduced for the first time to negative numbers. I wondered: How could that possibly be? How could a number be worth less than nothing? How could you add two numbers together and end up with a sum that was even smaller?

Now I’m having to learn the same thing all over again. All my life I’ve watched the popularity ratings of various politicians. That was a pretty simple concept. What seemed a lot trickier was factoring in what the experts called a “favorable/unfavorable” popularity rating. It’s no longer enough to know that Candidate A has a “favorability” rating of 40 percent with the American public. Now you must also keep in mind that Candidate A simultaneously carries an “unfavorability” rating of 55 percent—so that his actual, true-to-life score is more like negative 15 percent.

Got it?

All this is hard enough if you’re dealing with a campaign featuring just one especially obnoxious candidate. How do you accurately compare that candidate’s negative numbers to Mr. Nice-Guy’s positives? That’s challenging enough. But if you happen to find yourself in a unique contest offering a whole gaggle of would-be officeholders—and virtually all of them have high negatives—well, then you have a new mathematical challenge. You may even need a new app on your smartphone.

Truth-telling is a bipartisan virtue, and lying should be an embarrassment to any political party.

We’ve all wrestled, in various contexts, with the challenge of settling for the lesser of two evils. Which of all the possibilities before us offers your conscience the minimal number of negatives? If you’re a Democrat, does Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders force you into the most compromises? If you’re voting Republican, does Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, or John Kasich make you pinch your nose most tightly as you get ready to cast your ballot?

Since we’re talking about negative numbers, I suggest you stand this process on its head. Instead of trying to tell your friends and colleagues (and your own conscience!) all the good things about the candidate you’re presently backing, try compiling an honest list of negatives for each of the candidates. Then see if you can reasonably settle on the one with the shortest list.

And while you’re about the task of deciding which criteria matter most, try this: Is the candidate known as a truth-teller? Whether he or she is running for president or for dogcatcher, don’t you want somebody you can trust?

That challenge includes two important facets.

First of all, you as a citizen have a basic right to expect public servants to tell you the straightforward truth about what has happened in the past. This is where Hillary Clinton seems to stumble so often, and it’s why over two full decades she’s established a reputation for falsifying the past (see “Twenty years of lying” in WORLD’s Feb. 20 issue). So every time you hear a candidate make a claim about something significant that has already taken place, ask yourself whether the claim can be verified. Keep a list of what you find out. Does the record suggest a pattern of truth-telling—or of truth-dodging, truth-fudging, or truth-denying?

Second, you have a right to expect a candidate to tell the truth about the future. Have we learned any lessons through the cycle of rosy declarations about healthcare? Glib guarantees about free college tuition or a massive wall along the Mexican border are no more than empty bribes. In God’s eyes, stacks of unkeepable promises about the future are just as repugnant as false statements about the past.

Truth-telling is a bipartisan virtue, and lying should be an embarrassment to any political party. Just how many promises need to be broken before total cynicism takes over a society? The public knows the difference between inability to deliver and a straight-out lie. We’re pretty close already to the place where politicians’ platforms are totally discounted.

There are, to be sure, dozens and perhaps hundreds of legitimate criteria by which a candidate’s favorability—or unfavorability—might be properly measured. But for a Christian citizen, I suggest that nothing may be as important as the candidate’s reputation for consistently telling the truth.

Email jbelz@wng.org