In a perfect world voters would evaluate candidates for office based on their credentials and comprehension of the subject matter that is impacted by the office they’re seeking.
In theory, candidates for water board should know something about water, school board aspirants should be well versed in public education, and wannabe insurance commissioners should be very familiar with that industry.
Sadly, more often than not, the opposite is true.
In times of hyper-partisanship, voters assume you are competent if your belief system aligns with theirs.
Credentials be damned.
In fact, modern social science research backs this claim up.
In the Journal of Electoral Studies, political scientist Frederico Vegetti pooled a data set of European Election Studies from 1994 to 2009 and found that partisans are more likely to view their preferred party as the most competent and ideologically close when the environment is polarized.
Vegetti concluded, “as polarization increases, so does the collinearity between ideological and competence assessments.”
It’s a heck of a way to choose your government, but that’s what voters want.
And that’s why it’s so strange that candidates keep lying about their portfolios.
Politicians running for office are like guys on a bad first date: “Yeah, I finished first in my class at Harvard Law School…my family is really rich…I’m a combat veteran…I speak seven languages…I invented Spanxx.”
You know who should really run for office? That talented Mr. Ripley guy.
Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz stepped on this rake almost immediately after being selected by Vice President Kamala Harris to be her running mate, related to claims that he “served in war.”
In a 2018 video circulated by the Harris campaign in August, Walz referred to weapons “that I carried in war” while explaining his support for an assault weapons ban.
“We can make sure those weapons of war, that I carried in war, are only carried in war,” Walz said in the video.
Problem is, that never happened.
Lauren Hitt, a Harris campaign spokesperson, said in a statement the governor “misspoke” in the clip.
“Governor Walz would never insult or undermine any American’s service to this country — in fact, he thanks Senator Vance for putting his life on the line for our country. It’s the American way…In making the case for why weapons of war should never be on our streets or in our classrooms, the governor misspoke,” Hitt said.
Sure. First Walz said he “misspoke” about his make-believe war experiences, then he said it was all a grammatical error. In other words, he’s lying about his lying.
Will Rollins, a Democratic candidate for congress in the Corona and Palm Springs-based 41st congressional district is another liar-liar-pants-on-fire. He got caught lying about his occupation.
Rollins claimed to be a “counter-terrorism attorney,” as opposed to a regular, terrorist attorney.
Or as I call them, a “car-bomb chaser.”
Ultimately, a court ruled that the Western Riverside County Walter Mitty did not truthfully describe what he does for a living.
“There is no evidence before the Court that Rollins’ current principal profession can be accurately described as ‘counterterrorism attorney’” and that “the designation of ‘counterterrorism attorney’ and ‘counterterrorism advisor’ would be confusing or misleading to the voters, and therefore are not permissible ballot designations pursuant to Elections Code section 13107.”
Rollins was subsequently forced to change his ballot designation.
Then there’s the Santa Clarita-based 23rd state senate district, where Democratic candidate Kipp Mueller claimed on his campaign website that he “served in President Obama’s Department of Justice in the Consumer Protection Branch, and joined the Santa Clara District Attorney’s Office to protect the community from sexual predators and fraudsters.”
Muller reiterated these claims, and expanded on the details, in various public forums.
As it turns out, Mueller’s claim that he prosecuted fraudsters turned out to be fraudulent.
Hey, don’t they teach irony in law schools anymore?
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Eventually, intrepid investigative journalist Jennifer Van Laar reported in the pages of Red State that Mueller “was never employed by the U.S. Department of Justice or the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office, and we’ve found no evidence that he prosecuted fraudsters and sexual abusers.”
As a result, the editorial board of this newspaper concluded Mueller’s false claims were “not a good look for someone asking the public to trust him to represent them. It casts real doubt about his judgment and his ability to be honest with the public.”
Here’s a memo to current and aspiring politicians: Stop lying about your credentials! You’re likely to get caught, and nobody cares anyway.
As much as I hate the Internet sometimes, it’s made it a lot harder for charlatans to fabricate phony life stories.
So thanks, Al Gore!
I would also note that we live in a time when RFK, Jr. endorsed Donald Trump and Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris. So maybe old-school partisanship is on the way out.
Incidentally, whichever of those two guys you used to hate you love now, and whichever one you loved you now hate. Maybe jot that down.
John Phillips can be heard weekdays from noon to 3 p.m. on “The John Phillips Show” on KABC/AM 790.