However dramatic the presidential campaign rhetoric may have seemed, the really shocking statements came a few days after Barack Obama was elected. Key players, including John McCain, Sarah Palin and Obama himself, took great pains to explain that they held no hard feelings about the smears, half-truths, innuendos, and bald-faced lies they and their surrogates hurled at each other. “That’s just politics,” they all said.

And that’s just the problem, as far as I’m concerned. We’ve let our standards slip far too low. We tacitly endorse the Machiavellian code of princely power gained and held through deceit, rather than our founding fathers’ vision of self-governance through the wisdom of an informed electorate. We prefer the soap opera reality show to the documentary. But do we want to be entertained or governed?

From our television advertising to our school’s social promotion policies to our local and national electoral processes, we have systematically devalued the honest discussion of facts. A lot of organizations stifle candor because they value “branding” or “message points” more than messy facts. Some stifle candor out of simple incompetence. Others are conflict averse, which is akin to being thinking-averse. Problem solvers crave conflict, because they seek to understand.

Some organizations just think candor is weird: remember that John McCain originally earned the label “Maverick” because of an odd tendency to speak his mind and vote his conscience. Mercy! Do we really support a government where such behavior is “outside the box?”

This isn’t a rant against negative campaigning – we need to know why candidates oppose each other. But I do think we need to strike a blow for honest disagreements. How can we hold candidates, their campaigns and their supporters accountable when slander and libel laws do not apply to public figures? What do you think we can do about it?

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Want more candor in the workplace? You should. Here's an interesting Personal Candor Worksheet from Ridge Associates.

Dean Zatkowsky was a marketing executive at various Kinko’s companies from 1986-1999. He is managing partner of Dizzy One Ventures LLC.