Reverse Fotoshop for candidates

I’m not worried that the Internet may soon make oppo research on every candidate available to all voters. I’ve already exposed all my warts on this blog and on my old website.

Maybe it won’t happen this campaign, but I can see the day that a complete documentation on every politician of note, produced on the Web in Wikipedia fashion, would make opposition research redundant. When that day comes, we’ll finally be able to see our candidates in full and see that nearly every one of them has flip-flopped; made a fortune from either honest graft or dishonest graft; mistreated, divorced, or cheated on a spouse; taken drugs; lied; cheated; violated taboos; told dirty, racist, or otherwise tasteless jokes; stretched the fabric of the campaign finance laws; associated with bad people; engaged in resume inflation; taken dubious payments; or otherwise transgressed, just like you.

When the day of the Super Dossier comes, and it may even come by 2016, the power of the Web will teach us that nobody has enough character (Nixon? Clinton? GWB?) to be president. At that point, maybe all this standard human frailty will have become sufficiently normalized that we’ll have to pick our chief executive based on the policies and programs he binds himself to pursuing.

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