PATRICK HEALY ESSAY

Once considered politically out of bounds, the word “lie” - stated bluntly and unapologetically - has had its unveiling in the 2008 United States presidential campaign. Rarely does a day go by when aides to the Democratic nominee, Barack Obama, do not accuse the Republican ticket - John McCain, Sarah Palin or both - of lies and lying. And in a bit of psychological warfare, the Obama camp charges that the lies tarnish the honor of Mr. McCain - a virtue Mr. McCain, as a war hero, cherishes - in the hope of triggering his temper, Obama aides say.
On September 18, for instance, an Obama spokesman denounced, as “another flat-out lie from a dishonorable campaign,” a McCain television advertisement citing a newspaper report that Franklin D. Raines, the former leader of now-disgraced Fannie Mae, was advising Mr. Obama on housing issues.
The McCain camp has accused Mr. Obama far less of outright lying, saying instead that he has been “misleading” when he champions Second Amendment rights and “deceitful” and “not being honest” about his tax proposals.
Politicians have long referred to “lie” as “the L word” - in part because using the word could itself create a distracting dispute - and instead have substituted words such as “disinformation” and “spin” and phrases like “a tactical view of the truth.” But cable television now dissects so-called political lies all the time, helping to make the word part of the news-cycle language.
“Cable TV and the Internet have contributed to a really polarized system where each side sees the other side lying almost as a matter of course,” said Fred I. Greenstein, an emeritus professor of politics at Princeton University in New Jersey and the author of “Personality and Politics.” “As a result, civility breaks down and the euphemisms fade into outright accusations of lying, which can be refreshingly honest, in fact, since each side does truly see the other side as lying.”
Some Obama advisers were hesitant early on about calling out an alleged lie - especially against Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton - but they went right to it with Mr. Mc Cain. Mr. Obama himself, who has often spoken of elevating the political debate, still acts a little hesitant in his accusations: in Nevada recently, he would say only that a variety of McCain ads were “patently wrong.”
The incriminating word had long been a crisis waiting to happen because of its potential to damage the presidential candidate making the accusation. In 1988, Senator Bob Dole, running for the Republican nomination, appeared on an NBC interview with his rival, Vice President George Bush, and snapped at him, “Stop lying about my record.” It cemented Mr. Dole’s image as a mean person - which he had to wrestle with as the party’s nominee in 1996, when, for instance, some television viewers bristled as he accused Katie Couric of taking sides with the Democrats.
Neither Ms. Couric nor Tom Brokaw, the NBC interviewer in 1988, tried to be an arbiter in those moments, leaving viewers to make up their own minds about Mr. Dole.
As the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004, Senator John Kerry sometimes used 50 words to make a point when 25 would do. And he had a habit of saying things he shouldn’t , most famously when he declared, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.” But there was one word he was very careful not to utter.
During the first presidential debate, when the moderator, Jim Lehrer, noted that Mr. Kerry had repeatedly accused President Bush “essentially of lying” about his Iraq war strategy, Mr. Kerry instantly demurred.
“I’ve never, ever used the harshest word as you did just then, and I try not to,” he said, before going on to argue that Mr.
Bush “had not been candid” and had “misled” voters, and to assert that “it is important to tell the truth to the American people.”
Mr. Kerry hoped that the news media would judge a lie as a lie when he was battered by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth over his military record in Vietnam, but the media only did so much.
Bob Shrum, Mr. Kerry’s chief strategist, said: “We wanted to force a general election vote around the issues, especially domestic issues, and calling Bush a liar would have taken us off in a different direction.”
Geoff Stone, a University of Chicago law professor and an informal adviser to Mr. Obama, said: “When politicians ignore a lie and it doesn’t go away, they can be tainted, and when they deny it, they can sound defensive. Americans need someone who many people watch who has credibility and can be an independent arbiter - a Walter Cronkite, say - and there isn’t one.”