People who work to improve the quality of public culture deserve our attention and thanks. For example, Adrienne Schatz is one of the co-founders of the “Bonanza!” group. She explains that Bonanza! is:

a network of Republican and Democrat friends who’ve put aside differences – at least in this realm – to create www.bonanzag.com, a very comprehensive, accessible, and truly nonpartisan election resource. We emphasize fact-checking, and have compiled dozens of easily navigable links to information on candidates, issues, registration, voters’ rights, poll monitoring volunteer opportunities, humor (if you haven’t seen the shenanigans at www.jibjab.com, you should …), etc.

Commentators are saying that the Missouri citizens who asked the questions last Friday did a good job. They tend to note this with a tone of pleased surprise or patriotic piety. (“You see, ordinary American folks can do almost as well as professional reporters when the stakes are high.”) My take is different. I think ordinary people will almost always ask better questions than professional journalists, not because Americans are particularly thoughtful and well-informed, but because reporters have been trained to avoid the most obvious–yet vital–questions.

It’s extremely useful to ask candidates what they would do about a given problem in the future. This type of question is hard but obviously fair. It elicits information about knowledge and competence, values and priorities, and policy choices–in short, the “merits and measures” of public figures (to quote James Madison about what the press should report).

I count eight questions asked last Friday that were essentially about future policies. (Several more touched on the future while also mentioning character or past decisions.) In contrast, when President Bush gave an extremely rare White House press conference last April, the professional reporters who confronted him asked virtually nothing about current or future policies. Instead, they asked questions about the President’s personality that cemented their reputation as the hostile “liberal media” without actually giving Bush any difficulty at all. If you are asked, in effect, “Why are you so stupid?” then you don’t have to show any knowledge or address any difficult problems. You can just say something polite but forceful, and the reporter will look rude and biased.

It doesn’t occur to ordinary people to ask that kind of question. And the reason is fairly simple. They are trying to make up their minds about whom they should choose in November. Thus they need to know about candidates’ “merits and measures”–period. In contrast, journalists are trying to tell a story about the electoral conflict, the horse-race. For them, the interesting questions are: Who’s down and who’s up? How will candidate A reply to the charge made by candidate B? What tactic will A use? How does he intend to campaign from now on? What does he say about B?

A question or two of this type would be OK, but reporters’ relentless attention to the horse-race cheapens politics, lets incumbents off the hook, and makes professional journalists distinctly worse than other people at conducting political interviews.

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In our recent poll with MTV (pdf), we found that 78% of young Americans oppose a draft, but 32% think there probably will be one. Graffiti and posters on my campus suggest that there is a pretty widespread rumor that Congress is considering a conscription bill. The root of the rumors may be Rep. Charlie Rangel’s legislation to start a draft. Rangel is a liberal dove who sees universal conscription as a way to spread the burden of war to wealthy people and reduce the chances of foreign interventions. Republicans scheduled a vote on Rangel’s bill on Tuesday so that they could kill it (in a 401-2 vote) and try to end the draft rumors.

I’m of two minds about this. On one hand, young people have concerns about a possible draft, and those concerns are not foolish. If politicians seriously debated the issue of conscription (and more generally, who should serve in uniform), they would respond to young people’s concerns and perhaps increase their interest in politics. Furthermore, there are serious arguments in favor of conscription, as summarized in my Institute’s Quarterly (pdf).

On the other hand, I personally believe that there is zero chance of a draft. I know that the Pentagon is having difficulty meeting its recruitment targets, but only by a few thousand people. There are 3.5 million 18-year-olds. To increase recruitment by drafting a large proportion of the young population makes no sense. To draft only one in fifty thousand would create a “negative lottery” and undermine morale in the military and society at large. It would be far cheaper to increase the bonuses for signing up or lower the eligibility requirements a notch. To be sure, we could face a draft after a massive terrorist attack on US soil; but then conscription would be the least of our problems.

I’m somewhat unwilling to respond to youth concerns by demanding a public discussion of the draft, if there is no real prospect of conscription.

(Rock the Vote has been pushing the issue, but in a generally responsible way. See this page.)

Update: Matthew Yglesias cites even higher levels of concern about the draft among young people (51%) than we found and argues that there’s a real risk of conscription if Bush is reelected. Yglesias is young enough to be called up, so no wonder he’s worried.

Popular opinion holds that politicians are liars–generally. In my view, however, the Bush administration is different. They have repeatedly made extremely important claims that were false. In some cases, such as when they claimed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, I suspect that they were wrong at first, rather than mendacious. However, they failed to investigate and then correct the record, and this showed a damaging and blatant disrespect for truth.

So how is an opponent to respond? One answer is: fight fire with fire. It is crucial to defeat a reckeless and feckless incumbent, so you have to be extremely critical. Voters aren’t well-informed or sophisticated, so you must make your accusations simple and dramatic. People don’t believe politicians; they discount everything they hear by 50%; so you’d better inflate your claims.

I don’t know whether anyone really believes this answer, but I certainly disagree with it. I think a challenger in 2004 stands to gain enormously by developing a reputation for scrupulous honesty. The Bush administration has made so many grievous mistakes and misjudgments that there are plenty of accurate charges that one can launch. However, if you make an issue out of the incumbents’ dishonesty, then you must look like Abe Lincoln yourself, or else the “honesty issue” will become muddy. Even in our cynical age, some national politicians (Tsongas, McCain) have built reputations for truth-telling. In addition to being smart politics, there would be great civic advantages to a strategy of honesty that began to restore public trust in politics and government.

So why do Kerry-Edwards make factually dubious claims? Why do they say that we’re spending $200 billion on Iraq? Using a figure of $157 billion would have exactly the same political impact, and it would have the advantage of being true. Why did Senator Kerry claim that “The President hasn’t put one nickel … into the effort to fix some of our tunnels and bridges and most exposed subway systems”? Funding for this category of work has been terribly inadequate, but quite far above one nickel. ($115 million seems to be a better estimate.) Why do they claim that Vice President Cheney has benefited financially from contracts with Halliburton made during the Bush Administration? There are countless other charges to be made against Cheney and Halliburton that happen to be true. Finally (to consider a more subtle issue), why do they say repeatedly that casualties are increasing by the month in Iraq? This is literally true but misleading, since casualties were higher several months ago. It would work just as well to cite the total number of US dead and wounded.

I do not imagine that millions of people were visiting sites like www.factcheck.org until Dick Cheney tried to send them there. But if such neutral referees consistently gave a candidate good marks for honesty and accuracy, I think that impression would gradually get across in the mass media.

In short, I wish that Kerry-Edwards had hired professional fact-checkers and let them edit every speech, ad, and set of talking-points. By now, the Democrats would be perceived as considerably more honest than the incumbents, and that would count in November.

Update: The Decembrist complains about the equal treatment that Cheney and Edwards have received in the press, and asks: “Why couldn’t the headline be, ‘Cheney Tells Dozens of Whoppers’? Because that is the story, and the glib journalistic clich? of ‘both sides stretch the truth’ merely obscures the actual story.” I think the most accurate overall assessment would be: “Bush and Cheney tell massive and consequential lies, while Kerry and Edwards (who are not yet responsible for defending an incumbent administration) frequently resort to exaggerations and half-truths.” If this is the reality, then it’s no surprise that the actual headlines read “both sides stretch the truth.” Kerry and Edwards could have avoided those headlines (and still have won their debates) if only they had been scrupulous.

There was a time (I would say, the later nineties) when people who promote the economic and social development of poor countries were tremendously enthusiastic about non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Democracy, these people had discovered, meant more than voting; it required freedom of association, pluralism, and civil society. In practice, “civil society” boiled down to NGOs that could be funded. When there was a democratic state in place, NGOs could be supported as components of civil society. When the state was authoritarian and/or corrupt, NGOs could be funded as alternatives to the government. However, a strategy of funding NGOs creates problems as well as advantages. Michael Edwards’s book Civil Society is a good guide.

I’m part of a research project at the University of Tillburg, in the Netherlands, that will investigate the legitimacy of NGOs. (I’m an unpaid member of the research team, which means that my main contribution will be advice, which is worth about what it says in the budget.) The Tillburg researchers, Anton Vedder and his team, rightly lay out some of the main concerns about NGOs. Nobody elects these groups. They are accountable to foreign funders but not to local governments or publics. And they tend to promote single issues, which means that they are poorly placed to weigh competing values (such as environmental protection versus economic development, or economic welfare versus democratic processes). The Tillburg project will begin, usefully, by interviewing numerous NGO leaders to find our how they define their own legitimacy.