Political ethics: Competing with the likes of Wall Street and mortgage originators

[VV note: As a student in high school, I remember one thing being drilled into me ad nauseam: Don't take stuff out of context. To do so is called academic dishonesty. So I don't understand: Why is something dishonest in academia — and indeed in many other facets of our society — and yet deemed OK, even a valuable tactic, in politics? If we are to have a functioning democratic system, the ethics of politics should be equal to, even higher than, everyday life. Instead, they seem to stoop to the lowest common denominator, competing with the likes of Wall Street and mortgage originators. — LP]

Mitt Romney’s misleading attack ad

By Ezra Klein, WashPost, Updated: July 19, 2012

I was on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” today, and one of the segments led with a Mitt Romney campaign ad quoting President Obama’s “you didn’t build that” remarks. I remember thinking, as I heard the clip, that Obama’s remarks sounded way worse than I’d recalled. Turns out there’s a reason for that. As The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent reports, Romney’s team edited the president’s remarks to make an entirely different, and much more offensive, point than the one Obama actually made.

If you listen to Romney’s ad, you hear the president say this:

If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be ’cause I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something: If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

Here’s what Obama actually said, with the omitted sentences in bold:

If you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be ‘cause I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something: There are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

So, in Romney’s ad, “that” refers to “building a business.” In Obama’s remarks, “that” refers to the roads and bridges.

(More here.)