In the movie, Senator Joseph Paine is forced to choose between power and integrity, truth and lies. Rather than lose the support of the corrupt political machine that keeps him in the Senate, Paine chooses power and lies, participating in a smear campaign against Jefferson Smith, the son of his oldest friend.

That decision forces Paine to behave in a way that’s agonizingly discordant with who he truly is. He doesn’t have what it takes to be ruthless; he isn’t a cruel man by nature, he’s just spent so many years settling for Washington’s reasonable compromises that he no longer sees a difference between right and wrong.

But even when he can no longer see what’s right, he can still feel it. His smear campaign fills Paine with such self-loathing that he tries to commit suicide, fails, and then confesses his guilt on the floor of the Senate.

In the same way, I think John McCain isn’t cruel by nature --  he’s just been horse-trading so long in Washington that he’s lost his own internal compass. That’s why he veers wildly from one position to another, and why former supporters say they don’t know him anymore.

I also think that McCain loathes himself for choosing power and lies over integrity and truth.  Like Senator Paine, he's accepted the help of a corrupt political machine -- the very same advisors who smeared him in the last presidential campaign.  McCain allowed them to talk him into a totally unqualified vice-presidential candidate; he let them talk him into a smear campaign against Obama; and he knows full well those actions were dishonorable.  That's why he's sabotaging himself now, making what he unconsciously knows are huge blunders. 

I predict more self-destructive behavior to come...but I also think we’ll see a day when John McCain, like Senator Paine, returns to his principles.  The damage will have been done by then; his career, reputation, and self-respect will be in tatters -- but before the end credits roll, I think John McCain will retrieve his honor.

Unfortunately, the culture of deception that has so damaged our nation has its very roots in We, the People. In two studies carried out in 1996 by deception researchers Bella DePaulo and Deborah Kashy, 77 U.S. college students and 70 community members were asked to keep track of how often they deliberately attempted to mislead someone over the course of one week. Only 7 out of 147 participants – one student and six community members – claimed not to have lied at all; the rest admitted to collectively telling 1,535 lies in seven days. The students lied an average of two times a day, in one out of every three of social interactions lasting longer than ten minutes, and community members told one lie a day, in one out of every five interactions. Participants also reported that they did not regard their lies as serious, and claimed that both their targets and they would have felt worse if the truth had been told.

In other words, Americans see lying as normal and harmless -- so long as we're the ones doing it. That belief is so deeply ingrained that current deception research simply explores better ways to identify when someone is lying, rather than studying the prevalence of lying and its effects are over time.

And that's why we can't expect truth from our government. Our leaders are just like us; they're doing pretty much what you and I would do if we carried the future of democracy, the safety of the United States, and the lives of 300 million fellow Americans on our shoulders.

That doesn’t make lying right, of course. It just means that if we really want honest leaders, we’re going to have to raise our national standards – starting with ourselves. America has a choice to make: we can accept lying as a valid solution to inconvenient, painful, or threatening situations, or we can build our nation on truth and face the risks, hard work, and change the truth demands.

If we choose lying as our national way of life, we can continue to lie outright or only tell a small portion of the truth when it suits us. We can divert attention from the truth by sandwiching it between two lies, remain silent when we disagree, and pretend to have emotions we don't really feel. We can equivocate -- deliberately choosing words we know our listeners will misinterpret -- and use truthiness, saying what we wish were true, not what is. We'll pay a price for this luxury, though, since lies tend to erode trust in personal and business relationships and delay or even prevent effective solutions. Lies also tends to disconnect us from reality, because, as deception researcher Paul Ekman, Ph.D., points out, "someone who initially knows he is lying may over time come to believe his own lies."

If we choose a national culture of truth, however, there'll be hard work ahead. As individuals, each one of us will have to confront facts we may not like and learn to manage the messy, scary situations the truth can create. As a nation, we'll have to craft our foreign policy around what's real and true for other nations, not just for America. But if We the People truly want honest leaders, becoming a nation of truth-tellers is our only hope -- since honest leaders are far more likely to arise from a citizenry that is itself fundamentally honest.