Grading PolitiFact: Herman Cain, Social Security and Galveston County

Context matters -- We examine the claim in the full context, the comments made before and after it, the question that prompted it, and the point the person was trying to make.
--Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter

The issue:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The fact checkers:

Louis Jacobson:  writer, researcher
Martha Hamilton:  editor


Analysis:

When PolitiFact does a fact check, context matters.  They examine the claim in full context, including the comments before and after.  They painstakingly root out the question that prompted the claim and carefully consider the point the person was trying to make.

Yeah, right.

Hilariously enough, even though PolitiFact does not pay any attention at all to the question that prompted Cain's claim about the Galveston County retirement option, there remained sufficient context to figure out Cain's point.  But PolitiFact ignored that, too.

Cain's comment, along with the question that prompted the answer (bold highlights indicate the portion used by PolitiFact; bold emphasis added):

DISTASO: Thank you, John.

Mr. Cain, back to you. And while you're fired up there, let's turn to Social Security. Can you be specific regarding ages and income levels? Everyone talks about reform. What is your specific Social Security reform plan in regards to raising the retirement age, at what ages, cutting benefits and what income level means testing kicking in?

Thank you.

CAIN: Let's fix the problem and that is to restructure Social Security. I support a personal retirement account option in order to phase out the current system. We know that this works. It worked in the small country of Chile when they did it 30 years.

That payroll tax had gotten up to 27 percent for every dollar that the worker made. I believe we can do the same thing. That break point would approximately 40 years of age.

Now, young people realize they still got to contribute to the current system for those people that are on Social Security, that are near Social Security.

DISTASO: Are you going to raise the retirement age as president of the United States?

CAIN: I don't have to raise the retirement age, because that by itself isn't going to solve the problem. If Congress decides to do that, that's a different matter.

Here's -- let me give you one another example where this approach has worked. The city of Galveston, they opted out of the Social Security system way back in the '70s. And now, they retire with a whole lot more money. Why? For a real simple reason -- they have an account with their money on it.

What I'm simply saying is we've got to restructure the program using a personal retirement account option in order to eventually make it solvent.

It is powerfully obvious throughout Cain's statements on Social Security that he fixes his focus on the program's solvency.  For that reason, Cain doesn't bother with the details of Distaso's question, based as they are on the premise of the insolvency created by Ponzi financing and shifting demographics.

Cain suggests an alternate financing plan for individual retirement.

PolitiFact:

We’ll give Cain a pass on a pair of minor errors -- it’s Galveston County, not city, and the program launched in 1981, not in the 1970s. Instead, we’ll cut to the bottom line: Has the program meant that participants "retire with a whole lot more money" than they would under Social Security?

The answer to that question varies depending on whether we're talking about benefits or financing.  PolitiFact proceeds to focus exclusively on benefits.

PolitiFact summarizes several paragraphs comparing benefits under Social Security with those under Galveston County's alternate plan with the following:

The takeaway from the GAO and SSA studies is that the Galveston plan can be better than Social Security -- if you’re better off and if you fall into certain specific demographic categories. For many workers, especially those who are paid less, Social Security provides more.

This result doesn’t directly conflict with Cain’s statement, but it does undermine the sweeping certitude with which he said that participants will "retire with a whole lot more money."

Cain's certitude remains entirely intact in terms of financing.  Under Galveston County's system people's retirement plans are fully funded at the time they retire.  Social Security, by contrast, has spent the individual's contributions on benefits for persons already retired.  The government spends any remainder but promises to fund future benefits with the payroll deductions of future workers.

With Cain's point more prominent than a Truth-O-Meter graphic, PolitiFact still missed it:

On the specific question Cain raised -- whether participants in Galveston will "retire with a whole lot more money" than if they were in Social Security -- the answer is, "it depends." According to studies published a dozen years ago, some will, and some won’t. And the outlook today for the Galveston plan’s rate of return -- while not immutable going forward -- is more downbeat than it was in 1999. On balance, we rate Cain’s statement Half True.

Other than in its quotation of Cain, PolitiFact neglected to even mention Cain's focus.


The grades:

Louis Jacobson:  F
Martha Hamilton:  F

The PolitiFact team, in practical terms, completely ignored one of PolitiFact's plainly stated principles.  And since the principle was one of the good and important ones on PolitiFact's list, the team receives failing grades and the "Journalists Reporting Badly" tag.

Grading PolitiFact (Georgia): Herman Cain and hiring Muslims

Words matter -- We pay close attention to the specific wording of a claim. Is it a precise statement? Does it contain mitigating words or phrases?
--Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter

The issue:

(image clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The fact checkers:

Willoughby Mariano:  writer, researcher
Jim Denery:  editor
Jim Tharpe:  editor


Analysis:

PolitiFact's fact check in this case consists of a shell game.  Whether or not the PolitiFact team consciously planned that type of result I cannot say.

The pea:  Herman Cain will not appoint Muslims.

Shell No. 1 (bold emphasis added):

(A) blogger for liberal ThinkProgress.org questioned him at the Conservative Principles Conference in Des Moines, Iowa.

"Would you be comfortable appointing a Muslim either in your Cabinet or as a federal judge?" the blogger asked.

"No, I will not," Cain replied. "And here’s why. There is this creeping attempt, there’s this attempt to gradually ease Sharia law and the Muslim faith into our government. It does not belong in our government."

Shell No. 2 (bold emphasis added):

This brings us back to Beck’s radio show, where Cain said his statement was "misconstrued."

"[The reporter] said, would you be comfortable with a Muslim in your Cabinet?" Cain told Beck. "And I immediately said, without thinking, ‘No, I would not be comfortable.’ I did not say that I would not have them in my Cabinet. Because if you look at my career, I have hired good people regardless of race, religion, sex, gender or orientation and this sort of thing."

Shell No. 3 (bold emphasis added):

The Monday after the news broke, Cain recounted what he said on Fox News’ "Your World with Neil Cavuto."

"A reporter asked me ‘Would I appoint a Muslim to my administration?’ I did say ‘no,’ " Cain told Cavuto.

"And here’s why ... I would have to have people totally committed to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States. And many of the Muslims, they’re not totally dedicated to this country," he said. 

 Shell No. 4 (bold emphasis added):

In April, Cain repeated he would not hire a Muslim to radio host Bryan Fischer, who is also a conservative. We found an excerpt from the show on a website critical of the political right:

"[T]he comment I made that became controversial, and my staff keeps hoping will die, is that I wouldn’t have Muslims in my administration. And it’s real simple. The Constitution does not have room for Sharia law ... and to introduce that element as part of an administration when we’ve got all of these other issues, I think I have the right to say that I won’t," Cain said.  

The magicians at PolitiFact first show us shells No. 1 and No. 2, telling us that there is apparently no pea under either shell:

Indeed, the question the ThinkProgress.org blogger asked Cain was whether he would be "comfortable" with a Muslim in his Cabinet, not whether he would appoint one. If you take the video on its face, the explanation Cain gave on Beck’s show seems reasonable.

But PolitiFact informs us there is supposedly a problem.  There is a pea under shell No. 3 and another under shell No. 4--and apparently there was one under No. 1 after all:

(C)ontrary to his claim on Beck’s program, Cain did say he would not have Muslims in his Cabinet. Not once or twice, but three times in as many weeks to ThinkProgress.org, Cavuto and Fischer.

Consider PolitiFact's approach to this fact check.  The fact check team finds the claim from ThinkProgress consistent with the claim from the Beck program.  But they also find the ThinkProgress claim consistent with the statements from the Cavuto and Fischer programs.  The supposed consistency of the ThinkProgress material with the statements from each of the other venues individually shows that the original comment was ambiguous.

PolitiFact fails to plainly admit the ambiguity of the first comment.  Instead, it gets lumped in as a claim contrary to Cain's statement to Glen Beck.  But Cain's ThinkProgress and Beck comments cannot be both contradictory and non-contradictory.  That's a contradiction.  Yet that's exactly what PolitiFact concludes in the course of the fact check.

PolitiFact's logic fails

With PolitiFact's contradiction set aside we can more easily follow the movements of the entity manipulating the shells.

PolitiFact interprets two of Cain's statements (shell No. 3 and shell No. 4) as inconsistent with his statement to Beck (shell No. 2).  PolitiFact concludes that the statement to Beck was ridiculously false.  But somehow PolitiFact accomplished that feat without evaluating the other two statements as to their truth value.  If the other two statements are not true then the conclusion doesn't follow.

PolitiFact can't even appeal to its fallacious "burden of proof" criterion since Cain ought to have the burden of proof for both statements.  In this case, the structure of the story suggests that PolitiFact arbitrarily ruled two of Cain's statements true in order to find the fact-checked statement false.  In principle, one may obtain clues as to the truth values for a pair of conflicting statements, but this story displays no specific evidence of that type of reasoning.

What was Cain saying?

This analysis sets aside the question of whether Cain could successfully distinguish between hiring a Muslim as itself a political act and hiring a Muslim as the result of hiring the best available person for a given job.  The latter understanding, in fact, makes the original question from the ThinkProgress blogger nearly incomprehensible.  It is foolish to hire a person one does not trust--regardless of his religious persuasion.

In the end, Cain's statements parse with difficulty because of ambiguity.  PolitiFact avoids the problem by assuming a lack of significant ambiguity.  That approach is inappropriate in fact checking but ordinarily readily acceptable in opinion journalism.  PolitiFact is supposed to represent the former.


The grades:

Willoughby Mariano:  F
Jim Denery:  F
Jim Tharpe:  F

Herman Cain was using language capable of significant nuance because of its ambiguity, somewhat similar to the distinctions often drawn between "listening" and "hearing."  PolitiFact ignores those distinctions.  Worse, PolitiFact takes statements by Cain that might have appropriately received treatment as a flip-flop and instead rules one of the statements as false with no other justification than the discrepancy.


Afters:

Some of the non-objective writing in this piece deserves special attention:

Metro Atlantans are accustomed to Cain as an agitator. He’s been goading liberals for years as a conservative talk show host on AM 750 and 95.5FM News/Talk WSB.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is the type of language that opinion journalists use.

A reporter would make sure the assessment above came from a third-party source, or would at least provide some sort of evidence in support of the assessment.  In this case we get none of that.  Instead, the PolitiFact team simply provides readers its own assessment of Cain's style on the radio.

Cain's radio colleague, Neal Boortz, does agitate and goad liberals.  But Cain's style, at least in my experience, is conversational and non-confrontational.  Based in part on PolitiFact Georgia's previous ratings of Cain, there is reason to doubt whether the PolitiFact team has ever listened to Cain's radio program.  It would not surprise me if Mariano and company conducted their research on Cain's radio career by asking around in the newsroom and taking the resulting poll as a suitable summary of Cain's radio career.  Don't buy the PolitiFact portrait of Cain on faith.

The following YouTube video shows Herman Cain engaging President Bill Clinton on Clinton's health care plan.  The video serves as a good example of Cain's style of communication.



If anything, the video shortchanges Cain with respect to the humor and good will he used to good effect on the radio.

Why Herman Cain can't win the presidency

Herman Cain's recent appearance on CBS News provides a probable foretaste of his failed bid to win the presidency:

Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain told Hotsheet Wednesday that homosexuality is a sin and a choice.

"I believe homosexuality is a sin because I'm a Bible-believing Christian, I believe it's a sin," he said. "But I know that some people make that choice. That's their choice."
Cain was asked: "So you believe it's a choice?"

"I believe it is a choice," he responded.

The reporter was almost certainly asking Cain whether he believed homosexual orientation is a choice.

Cain was probably saying that he believes that homosexual sex acts are a choice.


The mainstream media will push the narrative that Cain thinks homosexual orientation is a choice, and  mainstream media narratives carry considerable weight with the independent voters a candidate needs in order to win national election.


If Cain doesn't learn to speak the language of the mainstream voter and thus prevent the mainstream media from constructing a narrative destructive to his chances for election, then Cain has no chance at the national level.  But he may remain a central player in the Republican primary right through the end.  Republican primary voters carry a stronger resistance to mainstream press narratives than the average voter.

Grading PolitiFact (Georgia): Herman Cain confuses the Constitution with the Declaration of Independence?

Is the statement significant? We avoid minor "gotchas"’ on claims that obviously represent a slip of the tongue.
--Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter

The issue:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The fact checkers:

Willoughby Mariano:  writer, researcher
Jim Denery:  editor
Jim Tharpe:  editor

Analysis:

I've heard Herman Cain speak on occasion over the years, as he often serves as a guest host on the Neal Boortz radio program.  On the radio, I've heard him incorrectly state on at least one occasion that passages in the Declaration of Independence occur in the Constitution.  Now PolitiFact claims he did the same thing during his announcement speech for his presidential run.  Is Cain confused?

PolitiFact:

"We don’t need to rewrite the Constitution of the United States," Cain said. "We need to reread the Constitution and enforce the Constitution."

"And I know that there’s some people that are not going to do that. So, for the benefit for those that are not going to read it because they don’t want us to go by the Constitution, there’s a little section in there that talks about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

"You know, those ideals that we live by, we believe in, your parents believe in, they instilled in you. When you get to the part about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, don’t stop right there, keep reading.

"’Cause that’s when it says that when any form of government becomes destructive of those ideals, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it. We’ve got some altering and some abolishing to do."

Cain’s exhortation sent your PolitiFact Georgia team scrambling for a closer look at the U.S. Constitution.

That last line is pretty funny.  The PolitiFact Georgia team did not immediately realize that "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" does not occur in the Constitution?  That certainly inspires confidence.  Though perhaps it was meant as a snarky way of pretending to assume that Cain must know what he's talking about.  Either way, it reflects poorly on PolitiFact Georgia.

Getting past that, it's clear that the line isn't in the Constitution.  So what does it mean?  Is it a significant statement?  Does Cain believe the line is in the Constitution or did he misspeak?

PolitiFact:

Constitutional history scholar and University of Pennsylvania professor Richard R. Beeman came to our assistance via email. That phrase is in the second paragraph of the preamble of the Declaration of Independence, which was written in 1776, 11 years before the Constitution was drafted during the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

Beeman agreed with Cain that we don’t need to rewrite the Constitution and it’s more important that Americans read it.

"It might be a good thing if Mr. Cain would undertake that task," Beeman said.

Snark from PolitiFact's expert source?  Say it isn't so.  Did Beeman assume that Cain did not simply misspeak?

PolitiFact:

We asked Cain’s campaign to respond. A spokeswoman said he sometimes mentions the Constitution and Declaration of Independence at the same time.

"Quite often, he references them together when speaking of his appreciation for the work of our Founders," she said.

I'd like to see the whole of that response.  The bit above falls short of saying Cain misspoke.  But it accurately states what Cain was doing during his speech.  The quotation from PolitiFact left out part of the relevant context (transcript mine):

You know, the founding fathers did their job.  And they did a great job at it.  And they kept it simple.

They wrote the Declaration of Independence.  They designed and wrote the Constitution of the United States of America.  And one of the other things that's part of our vision, is that we don't need to rewrite the Declaration.  We don't need to rewrite the Constitution of the United States--rewrite it, we need to reread the Constitution and enforce the Constitution.  We don't need to rewrite, let's reread.

And I know that there are some people who are not going to do that, so for the benefit of those that are not going to read it because they don't want us to go by the Constitution, there's a little section in there that talks about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  You know, those ideals that we live by, we believe in, your parents believed in, they instilled in you.  When you get to the part about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness don't stop there, keep reading.  Because that's when it says when any form of government becomes destructive of those ideals it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.

We've got some altering and some abolishing to do.

In context, Cain was talking about both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.  So does that mean that he knew the two clauses he apparently attributed to the Constitution were actually in the Declaration of Independence?  Not necessarily, but there's a pretty easy way to figure that out.  Not that PolitiFact shows any interest in following that proper course:

(C)onfusing the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence is no small mistake, especially for a candidate for president, said Donald E. Wilkes Jr., a University of Georgia law professor.

The Declaration is a statement of beliefs. The Constitution is the supreme law of the land.

"No court makes a legal decision based on the Declaration of Independence," Wilkes said.

Though I'm not a University of Georgia law professor, I'm going to partly contradict professor Wilkes.  Confusing the Declaration of Independence with the Constitution is a small mistake when one merely misspeaks yet well knows the difference.  Though certainly the minor error may be magnified by irresponsible reporting in the media as well as by comments from intellectual elites who have ignored the broader context.

PolitiFact rules Cain "False."

As noted via epigraph, the Truth-O-Meter, according to principle, does not rate obvious slips of the tongue.  That's why then-candidate for president Barack Obama was not rated from his statement about campaigning in all 57 states.  It is not reasonable to believe that Obama thinks there are more than 50 states.

Likewise, it is not reasonable to believe that Herman Cain thinks "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" occurs in the Constitution.

Why not?

Because Cain talks about the founding documents frequently.  He has correctly attributed those statements frequently over time, and it's easily verified.

Iowa (go to 3:24):




Cain talking about the Declaration of Independence at a high school:




Given the broader context, totally ignored by PolitiFact, it is plain that Cain committed a minor error of misstatement.  He knows the source of the words as well as Obama knows the number of states.

If PolitiFact did not bend its principles then the supposed principles are so ambiguous as to be effectively meaningless.

The grades:

Willoughby Mariano:  F
Jim Denery:  F
Jim Tharpe:  F

Cain's from the Atlanta area, so Mariano, Denery and Tharpe (all of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution) have added reason to know Cain knows the origin of the words he referenced.

This was a minor "gotcha" on a minor slip of the tongue from Cain.  PolitiFact's principles ought to have prevented this fact check.

Grading PolitiFact (Georgia): Herman Cain and the early objective of Planned Parenthood

We always try to get the original statement in its full context rather than an edited form that appeared in news stories.
About PolitiFact

The issue:

The fact checkers:

Willoughby Mariano:  writer, researcher
Jim Tharpe:  editor


Analysis:

Let's dive right in with PolitiFact's explanation of the issue:

"When Margaret Sanger - check my history - started Planned Parenthood, the objective was to put these centers in primarily black communities so they could help kill black babies before they came into the world," Cain said during a talk in Washington, D.C., at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative group.

"It's planned genocide," Cain added. He wants the U.S. Congress to yank funding for Planned Parenthood, which receives about $75 million a year to provide non-abortion health services.

Was Planned Parenthood founded to help kill unborn black babies?

Cain went on to talk about today's Planned Parenthood working to fulfill its "original mission," so it's probably fair to infer that Cain is, at minimum, linking the killing of black babies with that original mission.

The line about killing black babies prior to birth accounts for my agreement with PolitiFact on one aspect of Cain's claim:  The early incarnations of Planned Parenthood didn't do much to push abortion.  It was too controversial at the time.

But before we move on, please note that we do not have Cain's comment in its original context.  We have PolitiFact relying on a news account of Cain's speech.  PolitiFact claims that it "always" tries to work from an original version of a claim to allow consideration of the surrounding context.  If it isn't important to consider the surrounding context, then why assure readers that searching out the context is standard practice?  And if the original context is important, then shouldn't any fact check lacking the original context make special note of that missing feature?

In Cain's case, the original context is missing, and PolitiFact fails to emphasize the potential significance of missing material.

The ensuing fact check emphasizes that there is no good evidence that black babies were killed and that the evidence that Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger was personally racist is of the poorest quality.

I'm already on record supporting the former point.  But Sanger's personal beliefs are largely irrelevant to the implicit argument that Planned Parenthood has a history of targeting blacks.

The PolitiFact story offered a fleeting glimpse of the elephant in the room:

Eugenics was once a wildly popular theory that the human race can be improved through better breeding and genetics. It drew together backers as diverse as President Theodore Roosevelt and black intellectual W.E.B. DuBois.

At its best, the U.S. movement pushed for better prenatal care. At its worst, it enabled forced sterilization laws and let claims that blacks and immigrants were inferior to masquerade as science.

Sanger welcomed some of the movement’s more notorious leaders onto the board of a predecessor to Planned Parenthood.

The question any journalist should have sought to answer after a statement like that is why Sanger welcomed some of the most notorious leaders of the eugenics movement into leadership in her organization.

Dorothy Roberts summed up the relationship well in her essay "Margaret Sanger and the Racial Origins of the Birth Control Movement":

The eugenics movement supported Sanger's birth control clinics as a means of reaching groups whose high fertility rates were thought to threaten the nation's racial stock and culture.

"Racially Writing the Republic: Racists, Race Rebels, and Transformations of American Identity," Bruce Baum and Duchess Harris, editors, Duke University Press

Sanger herself was more directly concerned with the disastrous effects of a Malthusian population bomb.  British scholar Thomas Malthus, back in the 19th century, had theorized that exponential population growth led inexorably to an extinction or near-extinction disaster.  Sanger bought the idea.  But unlike the eugenicists who wanted to explicitly adjust racial demographics, Sanger primarily wanted fewer people generally rather than a smaller number of any particular race or set of races, though it is also true that she believed in the power of eugenics to better the human race as a whole by allowing poor genetic lines to die off.

By moving the emphasis to Sanger's personal beliefs, PolitiFact ends up presenting a whitewashed version of Planned Parenthood's history and a misleading evaluation of Cain's claim.  Cain, after all, claimed nothing about Sanger other than calling her the founder of Planned Parenthood.   As a result, aspects of the fact check such as the following miss the point:

But we found no evidence that Sanger advocated - privately or publicly - for anything even resembling the "genocide" of blacks, or that she thought blacks are genetically inferior.

Every academic PolitiFact Georgia consulted said that Cain’s claim is wrong.

"I have never run into any serious academic reference of Sanger or others wanting to ‘kill black babies,’" Indiana University professor Ruth Engs, a eugenics movement expert, told PolitiFact Georgia in an e-mail.

Engs at least extends her defense of Sanger to "others," but uselessly bases it on a lack of the desire to "kill black babies," which in turn obscures the varieties of racial motivation found in the ranks of the eugenicists who supported Sanger's birth control initiatives.

Despite pointing out Sanger's association with eugenicists, the PolitiFact Georgia team can scarcely imagine why eugenicists would want birth control for the undesirable population:

Really, calling the Negro Project a genocidal plot defies common sense. Why would Sanger try to destroy a race of people by giving them access to the very thing she thought could make life better?

Sanger probably wouldn't, but her eugenicist allies would.  Roberts succinctly fills the journalistic hole left by Mariano and Tharpe:

Even if the Negro Project did not intend to exterminate the black population, it facilitated the goals of eugenicists.  Eugenicists considered southern blacks to be especially unfit to breed on the basis of a theory of "selective migration," which held that the more intelligent blacks tended to migrate to the North, leaving the less intelligent ones behind.

Roberts goes on to note that North and South Carolina instituted state-run birth control initiatives while the use of contraceptives remained unlawful in enlightened Massachusetts. 

Sanger's view that fecundity resulted in poverty and thus lack of reproductive fitness was not a popular view among eugenicists.  The overtly racist eugenicists could see a benefit to giving contraceptives to an undesirable class of persons.  And the non-racist eugenicists most likely to ally with Sanger likewise saw a good result in limiting the population of the unfit:

These close allies of birth control held more rigidly deterministic views than Sanger did.  As Kevles notes, what distinguished these men from other social reformers was their firm belief that biology mattered.  In disparaging the racial prejudice of mainstream eugenics, they did not dispute its goals, only its methods.

Carole R. McCann, "Birth Control Politics in the United States, 1916-1945"

As with the lending practice of redlining, preventing the births of black children to a greater degree than preventing the births of others is not necessarily a racist practice.  And if Cain erred by referring to killing black babies, he was at least correct that Planned Parenthood's roots contain a concerted effort to reduce procreation by blacks, especially in the South.

Presumably the media experts at PolitiFact have no real knowledge of this, so we can't be surprised at the conclusion:

Cain’s claim is a ridiculous, cynical play of the race card. We rate it Pants on Fire.

Cain's claim was only ridiculous to the extent it is restricted to the method of limiting the reproduction of blacks.  The PolitiFact team exhibits difficulty in restricting its evaluation to that point and provides a distorted picture in the end.

And it's worth noting that calling Cain's claim a "cynical play of the race card" is a outright editorial judgment, rather than a check of the facts. 


The grades:

Willoughby Mariano:  F
Jim Tharpe:  F

If the original context is important then treat it that way.  Otherwise, revise the descriptions of PolitiFact's process.

It seems that fact checkers had a pair of facts they wanted to check ("Was Margaret Sanger a racist?" "Did Planned Parenthood kill babies fetuses back in the early days?") and used Herman Cain as their excuse to check those data points.  In the process, the validity of Cain's point about the unseemly origins of Planned Parenthood received short shrift.

Afters:

This fact check provides yet another example of PolitiFact's practical immunity from the standards it applies to others.  PolitiFact's "burden of proof" criterion allows PolitiFact to rule a statement "False" if the claimant fails to substantiate his claim.  Yet we're supposed to trust PolitiFact's ruling despite the apparent lack of a complete record of Cain's statement.

As well, one could note the lack of a strictly objective criterion for ridiculousness that would allow PolitiFact to distinguish between "False" and "Pants on Fire."