Grading PolitiFact: Sarah Palin, campaigning, and ACORN

Where the lack-of-favorable-interpretation bug bites again.


The issue:


Fix that in your mind: "Sarah Palin claims the campaign did not elaborate on Obama's association with ACORN." I will suggest that PolitiFact has produced a straw man.


The fact checkers:

Robert Farley: writer, researcher
Bill Adair: editor


Analysis:

The opening of Farley's piece is delightfully deceptive, as we reach the straw man stage in three easy steps.

Step one:

In her book Going Rogue, Sarah Palin laments her campaign not hitting harder on Barack Obama's relationship with ACORN.

Farley is extremely accurate on this point. He fairly represents one of Palin's claims, that the campaign did not hit hard enough on Obama's relationship with ACORN. For our purposes, let us simply note that not hitting hard enough is not the same thing as not "elaborating."

Step two:

"On the campaign trail many had been hesitant to talk about legitimate fears that Obama's past comments and associations with anti-capitalist radicals would influence his economic policy," Palin wrote. "The press gave the impression it was the wrong thing to do. I was 'going rogue" when I answered reporters' questions about candidate Obama's associations and pals. I wish we had talked more about them, and about Obama's close relationship with ACORN, the voter-fraud specialists. But we did not elaborate on any of that during the campaign."

Here, Farley accurately quotes from Palin's book, "Going Rogue."

Step three:

That didn't jibe with our recollections from covering the campaign. So we did a quick search of our e-mail inbox to refresh our memory.

What exactly was "That"? The straw man comes out of thin air and is established only by the following context, where Farley focuses exclusively on ACORN and totally ignores the main thrust of the paragraph.

Let's have another look, highlighting in particular the portion referring to ACORN:

On the campaign trail many had been hesitant to talk about legitimate fears that Obama's past comments and associations with anti-capitalist radicals would influence his economic policy. The press gave the impression it was the wrong thing to do. I was 'going rogue" when I answered reporters' questions about candidate Obama's associations and pals. I wish we had talked more about them, and about Obama's close relationship with ACORN, the voter-fraud specialists. But we did not elaborate on any of that during the campaign.
(red emphasis added)

Put another way:

On the campaign trail many had been hesitant to talk about legitimate fears that Obama's past comments and associations with anti-capitalist radicals would influence his economic policy. The press gave the impression it was the wrong thing to do. I was 'going rogue" when I answered reporters' questions about candidate Obama's associations and pals. I wish we had talked more about them, and about Obama's close relationship with ACORN, the voter-fraud specialists. But we did not elaborate on any of that during the campaign.

The main idea of the paragraph concerns "past comments and associations with anti-capitalist radicals" and the potential influence on economic policy. So Farley takes the last sentence and applies it in particular to a minor clause in the next-to-last sentence. And that turns into Palin's supposed claim that disagrees with PolitiFact's recollections.

That simply is not the best reading of the paragraph. Read the whole of it minus the ACORN part and it reads just fine. But read it as "I wish we had talked more about Obama's close relationship with ACORN, the voter-fraud specialists. But we did not elaborate on that during the campaign." and the result seems barely comprehensible. If "elaborate" is supposed to mean that the campaign did not mention ACORN then the sentence is already self-contradictory. One cannot talk more about something if one has not talked at all about that particular thing.

The last sentence is best construed to refer to the main idea of the paragraph, indicating Palin's opinion that the campaign did not elaborate on potential ramifications for Obama's economic policy stemming from his past associations. If the last sentence was intended to also refer to her comment about ACORN--which is possible--then it is best taken as an amplification of her point that the campaign did not talk enough about Obama's past associations with ACORN.

Farley goes hyper-literal and combines the last sentence with the previous one to produce the claim "the campaign did not elaborate on Obama's association with ACORN." This represents a very uncharitable interpretation. Farley invented that stand-alone claim.

If the last sentence referred to ACORN, then it should have been taken to mean "elaborate" in the sense of adding detail to the detail the campaign actually offered, consonant with "I wish we had talked more about ... Obama's close relationship with ACORN, the voter-fraud specialists."

The rest of the piece consists of the destruction of a straw man, along with blaming Palin for its existence.


The grades:

Robert Farley: F
Bill Adair: F



Nov. 20, 2009: Belatedly closed a couple of quotations.