PolitiFact opts for neutrality in Brown-Coakley race

PolitiFact nearly weighed in on the claims coming from the Massachusetts special election coming later today.

But rather than challenging any of Martha Coakley's dubious claims, including one parroted by President Obama during his campaign appearance on Coakley's behalf, PolitiFact opted to give Obama a flip-flop rating on its "Flip-O-Meter."

At least the "Truth-O-Meter" has some competition in the dopey-names-for-rating-graphic category.

The layout of the PolitiFact page (this will change with time, hence the partial screen capture) will surely draw the attention of those interested in the Brown-Coakley race:

Pardon my sarcasm above.  Not much to enable the reader to connect this rating to the special election, is there?  And the treatment of the Coakley campaign's claims about Brown's voting record showed PolitiFact's reluctance to let their ratings mar Coakley's chances in the election:

In September, the Coakley campaign commissioned an analysis of Brown's voting record from Insta Trac, a nonpartisan Massachusetts legislative bill tracking service. As the Coakley campaign has hammered often, the firm found that since 2007, Brown has voted with the Republican Senate Minority Leader Richard Tisei 96 percent of the time. But Brown has been in the Massachusetts Senate since 2004, and he voted with Tisei's predecessor, Brian Lees, 82 percent of the time. We verified those numbers with Insta Trac president Michael Segal.

Also, Brown served for six years in the Massachusetts House, and according to Insta Trac statistics, he voted with Republican leadership there about 92 percent of the time. We tallied all of Brown's votes in the state House and Senate (3,104 votes in all) and confirmed the Coakley campaign's claim that he has voted with Republican leadership 90 percent of the time as a state legislator. We think that probably would be a fairer number for Obama to cite, unless he qualified that he was just talking about Brown's voting record over the past two years.

But our aim here is not to quibble with Obama's number. Rather it's that Obama was citing these voting records to dispel Brown's claims of independence.

Coakley not only cherry-picked the numbers, but allowed her campaign to cook them.  And though PolitiFact keeps Coakley out of trouble by careful omission, her campaign used the numbers to make the same claim Obama made about Brown's independence:

BOSTON – Scott Brown has touted himself as an “independent voter” throughout this campaign, but a review of his votes during his career as a state legislator demonstrates that he has actually been a lockstep, robotic Republican vote.

I like how Coakley's people provide a dateline location ("BOSTON") while showing nary a clue about AP style, by the way.  Nice touch!  Makes it look like news!

Though PolitiFact cites the page I quoted from, they never connect Obama's flawed argument to Coakley.

Watch for an evaluation of this PolitiFact item later in the week.



1/19/10:  Added some helpful URLs.