Grading PolitiFact: Characterizing Mitt Romney's characterization of Obama

PolitiFact's attempt to use an "In Context" item to soften the negative effects of President Obama's "you didn't build that" moment didn't work out so well.

More was needed to help the president.



The issue.

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The fact checkers:

Louis Jacobson:  writer, researcher
Bill Adair:  editor


Analysis:

Watch how many times PolitiFact uses partial quotations to protect its Obama from having his statement taken out of context.  We have two already in the graphic up above ("is the result of government" "hard-working people").

On with the fact check.

PolitiFact tells us that the Romney campaign and the Obama campaign have been wrangling over whether the latter insulted entrepreneurs.  That issue is somewhat settled when entrepreneurs perceive an insult.  Romney wins that point.  PolitiFact wants to let us know that Obama did not mean to insult entrepreneurs.  And maybe attacking Romney in relation to this issue is the ticket.

PolitiFact:

Romney, in comments at public events and in several ads, has argued that the remarks show a general disdain for business. The Republican National Committee and the National Federation of Independent Business are among the groups have [sic] released their own videos and statements echoing Romney that the president is out of touch.

The above summary is fair but potentially misleading.  We'll watch for those effects as the story progresses.

PolitiFact:

In one fundraising e-mail [sic], Matt Rhoades, Romney’s campaign manager, decried Obama’s "naïve view that government, and not the hard work, talent, and initiative of people, is the center of society and the economy."

The email from Rhoades helps make it plain that PolitiFact distorts the Romney campaign's argument.  The argument is that Obama credits the government too much, not that he doesn't credit entrepreneurs at all. Yet the latter is what PolitiFact suggests in its graphic.

PolitiFact:

In another campaign e-mail [sic], Amanda Henneberg, a Romney spokeswoman, said Obama had "denigrated Americans who built their own businesses."

Henneberg's statement dovetails with the Romney campaign message that Obama overemphasizes the role of government, but PolitiFact can potentially make it look like she is saying that Obama gives entrepreneurs no credit.

PolitiFact:

The issue has become so big that the Obama campaign felt the need to address the issue head-on in a Web video titled "Tampered" that quoted media accounts saying the quote had been taken out of context.

The current size of the issue could mean that the Romney campaign is right that that Obama is out of touch.  But it would help Obama if it appeared that people were simply misled by Romney about what Obama said.  PolitiFact did the Obama campaign a favor, by the way, by overlooking for the sake of this story the Obama campaign video suggesting Obama did not say what Romney quotes him to say.



Not only was Obama taken out of context, he didn't even say it in the first place.

Or something like that.

PolitiFact settles on the latest Romney campaign video for purposes of its fact check, focusing in particular on the Romney campaign's preface to the video:

President Obama recently said: "If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen."

Clearly, this President doesn't understand how our economy works.

Mitt Romney understands that we have to celebrate people who start enterprises and employ other people rather than devalue them. Success is not the result of government, it is the result of hard-working people who take risks, create dreams, and build lives for themselves and for their families.

PolitiFact:

In this item, we’ll rate the claim that Obama was saying success "is the result of government," not "hard-working people," when he said, "If you've got a business, you didn't build that. Somebody else made that happen."

PolitiFact distorts Romney's claim by taking his comments out of context.  Ironic, no?

PolitiFact tries to set the stage by asserting that Romney's quote of Obama distorts the meaning of Obama's claim.  In effect, PolitiFact suggests this is obvious if one reads Obama's statement in context.  But doesn't the entire context of Obama's statement emphasize the role of the government in business creation at the expense of the entrepreneur?  How does PolitiFact miss the obvious?

PolitiFact:

We believe, as do our friends at FactCheck.org and the Washington Post Fact Checker, that Romney has seriously distorted Obama’s comments.

PolitiFact is checking this fact by proclaiming it obvious that the context of Obama's statement puts the lie to Romney's claim.  Other fact checkers supposedly agree.  Hopefully one or both of them actually bothered to check some facts.

There's really nothing like that in this fact check.  It consists of PolitiFact insisting that Obama was taken out of context, and Romney's statements taken out of context make up the bulk of the case against Romney.

PolitiFact's conclusion, part one

In speeches and videos, the Romney campaign has repeatedly distorted Obama's words. By plucking two sentences out of context, Romney twists the president's remarks and ignores their real meaning.

The preceding sentences make clear that Obama was talking about the importance of government-provided infrastructure and education to the success of private businesses.

PolitiFact is partly right.  Obama was extolling the importance of the government role in allowing business to prosper.  He did so in the context of beneficiary businesses "giving back" as if it wasn't the taxes of businesses that helped pay for the infrastructure in the first place.  And the words he used diminish the role of individual effort ("Let me tell you something -- there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there").

Why does PolitiFact simply ignore the material in Obama's speech that diminishes the importance of the entrepreneur?

PolitiFact's conclusion, part two:

Romney also conveniently ignores Obama's clear summary of his message, that "the point is ... that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together."

By leaving out the "individual initiative" reference, Romney and his supporters have misled viewers and given a false impression. For that, we rate the claim False.

Romney ignores Obama's "clear summary" because the summary is ambiguous.  The summary provides no justification for successful businesses "giving back."  That concept comes out as Obama essentially tells entrepreneurs that they were lucky (others worked just as hard) and owe a big honkin' portion of their success to Our Glorious Government.  And the government, Obama says, is ready to take its rightful cut.

By leaving out the reference to increasing taxes on entrepreneurs, PolitiFact misleads its readers and gives a false impression.

PolitiFact creates what Mr. Obama likes to call a "false choice."  It isn't whether the government gets all the credit or the entrepreneur gets all the credit.  It's which one has the lead role in the economy (bold emphasis added):

Matt Rhoades, Romney’s campaign manager, decried Obama’s "naïve view that government, and not the hard work, talent, and initiative of people, is the center of society and the economy."

By neglecting the importance of that context, PolitiFact again misleads readers and gives a false impression.


The grades:

Louis Jacobson:  F
Bill Adair:  F

Once again, the subject of the fact check was arguably more accurate than his would-be fact checkers.

Afters:

The fact checks by Annenberg Fact Check and the Washington Post Fact Checker essentially leap to the same conclusions PolitiFact achieved with its leaps of logic.  But both of the other fact check services did a superior job to PolitiFact in providing context for the issue.


Aug. 4, 2012:  Fixed a handful of minor typos/grammatical errors

Blue Lectroids in Jersey?

That's it! These red creatures, they somehow give off the bacteria, we breath it, it swims up our nose... to our cerebral cortex, where it literally talks to our brain cells, tells us to see exactly what they want us to see.
--New Jersey (Jeff Goldblum), "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension"

And these blue creatures--PolitiFact journalists--give off fact checks which literally talk to our brains and make use see exactly what they want us to see.  That is, they purport to fact check statements that the figure in question either did not make or clearly did not intend as interpreted by PolitiFact.

Raymond Bateman, former Republican state senator in New Jersey:  "New Jersey’s North-South political landscape during the Civil War was definitely mixed — remember that Cape May, Cumberland, Salem and part of Atlantic counties are all south of the Mason-Dixon line."

What the Blue Lectroids want you to hear:  "The Mason-Dixon line crossed into New Jersey."

Republican Senate candidate Joe Kyrillos:  "Here's the thing: our economy is not performing. We are not producing jobs. We created 80,000 jobs last month. We don't talk about the jobs that we lost. The net of it all is that we lost jobs. And so listen, raising taxes now in these times is not going to help with job creation."

What the Blue Lectroids want you to hear:  "We are not producing jobs."

It's not just PolitiFact New Jersey.  Made-up and sculpted claims occur regularly in the PolitiFact catalog across the states.

Don't trust the Blue Lectroids.

Bateman may have been a bit off with his description of New Jersey's racial history--the northern part of Jersey has a more significant history in the slave trade than the southern portion.  But there's no question at all that the southern part of New Jersey is south of the Mason-Dixon line, even if it is not directly south.

Kyrillos was obviously talking about the big picture, otherwise he doesn't directly contradict himself by flatly saying "We created 80,000 jobs last month."  The explanation from the Kyrillos campaign was coherent and sensible.  The U.S. has failed to recover all the jobs lost from the recession, and the present job recovery is the slowest in the post-WW2 era.  PolitiFact played the part of the pedant on this one.

Don't trust PolitiFact.


Update 7/18/2012:

Blue Lectroids also apparently monitor "Fox & Friends."

Fox News host Steve Doocy:  ""If you make more than $250,000 a year, (President Obama wants to) jack up your taxes about 5 percent.  But when you think about it, at $250,000 you only really take home about $125,000, which in some parts of the country, if you've got a couple of kids in college, is not much money."

What the Blue Lectroids want you to hear:  "Someone earning $250,000 pays half that in taxes."

PolitiFact wants us to forget that "take-home pay" means what you get after things like pension contributions and an employee's share of an insurance premium come out of a check.

PolitiFlub: Blaming Romney for blaming Obama

PolitiFact has found yet another method for allowing inconsistent standards to taint its ratings of political statements.

Call it the "blame game" game.

We saw an early warning of this tendency in the form of gauging credit rather than blame.  PolitiFact repented of supposedly overplaying the degree to which President Obama took credit for positive changes in job numbers.  Obama received an upgrade from "Half True" to "Mostly True" in that case.

We saw it again earlier this week when PolitiFact gave both the Obama campaign and the Romney campaign "Half True" ratings based on blame.  Obama adviser David Axelrod tied Romney to Massachusetts' job creation ranking during Romney's tenure as governor.  Romney campaign spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom responded by pointing out a positive trend in the Massachusetts ranking under Romney as well as an overall positive picture of unemployment in the state.  Did Fehnstrom simply add important context to the situation described by Axelrod or was he giving Romney credit?  PolitiFact ignored the former possibility and docked Fehrnstrom down to "Half True" despite accurate statistics.

Later in the week PolitiFact gave us yet another example.

PolitiFact:

In a new Web ad, the Romney campaign questions how Hispanics in the U.S. have fared under President Barack Obama.

The ad, titled "Dismal," flashes shadowy faces of Latinos along with text citing rising unemployment and poverty rates in that minority group. The statistics are bookended by clips from Obama’s own Spanish-language ads that say the country is moving in the right direction.

"Really?" the ad asks.

To PolitiFact, the above unquestionably shows that the Romney campaign is blaming Obama for the economic plight of Hispanics.  PolitiFact communicates this clearly in the conclusion (bold emphasis added):

Our ruling

Romney’s ad correctly states that more Hispanics in the U.S. have fallen below the poverty line since Obama took office: 2.25 million more people through 2010, according to the census.

But the ad’s clear message is that it’s Obama’s fault but experts say it's a much more complicated picture than that. We rate the statement Half True.

Isn't the ad's message much more complicated than simply blaming Obama for the level of Hispanic unemployment?

The ad shows Obama's claims that the country is moving in the right direction.  Is Obama claiming credit for taking the country in the right direction?  The Romney campaign ad does not address that question.  Instead, it uses the stats on Hispanic poverty rates to question Obama's claim that the country is moving in the right direction.

PolitiFact badly overstates the degree to which the ad blames Obama for changes in Hispanic poverty rates.  At most, the ad faults Obama for not doing a better job of improving the American economy, even to the point where the poverty rate among Hispanics would bear out a claim like "We're moving in the right direction."

The Romney campaign hit Obama on a legitimate discrepancy between Obama's claim and the Hispanic poverty rate.  PolitiFact's use of blame to drop the rating amounts to grasping at straws, and grasping at straws is an unbecoming behavior for fact checkers.

Fact checking as PolitiFact does it in the above cases remains indistinguishable from deliberate partisan spin.

PolitiFlub: The argument over job creation in Mitt Romney's Massachusetts

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

Apparently PolitiFact simply isn't capable of applying the results of its examination.

A  pair of fact check stories published yesterday illustrate the point.

The Obama campaign has hit former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney over his record on job creation in that state.  The Romney campaign has replied with numbers that imply Romney performed well in Massachusetts on job creation.

PolitiFact picks up on the context of battling rhetoric:

Both presidential campaigns are using job statistics to attack each other. President Barack Obama and his allies have spent months criticizing Mitt Romney’s job-creation record as governor of Massachusetts. Now, Romney and his surrogates are arguing that job creation in Massachusetts actually improved on Romney’s watch.

So who’s right?

PolitiFact's wrong, at least if we take its "attack each other" description to apply to this pair of fact checks.  The Obama campaign is attacking.  The Romney campaign is defending.  PolitiFact mischaracterizes the relationship between the two claims and botches at least one of the rulings.

PolitiFact:

For this fact-check, we'll follow our usual approach of looking at the claim in two parts: first, are the numbers correct, and second, how much is the change because of Romney's policies?

The described approach works well, at least potentially, for the attacking claim from Obama campaign adviser David Axelrod.  Axelrod says Massachusetts ranked 47th in job creation under Romney.  The claim only makes sense in the campaign if Romney is significantly responsible for the number.

The same approach is wrong for Eric Fehrnstrom's reply because Fehrnstrom is countering Axelrod's attack.  Fehrnstrom's argument doesn't require credit to Romney for the rise in rankings.  Fehrnstrom's statistic plays its primary role in undercutting Axelrod's argument.  Fehrnstrom, in effect, supplies part of the context that Axelrod deliberately neglected.

PolitiFact often bases its rulings on the degree to which a statement ignores context that might shed different light on a claim.  Fehrnstrom's head and shoulders over Axelrod in that regard in this case, but PolitiFact misreports Fehrnstrom's role in the argument and laughably gives both statements a "Half True" rating.

Want some partisan spin with your fact checking?  PolitiFact's your source.

(for Glenn Kessler and PolitiFact) How to fact check the job recovery numbers

A valuable media watchdog watchdog post at the new blog "counterirritant" pointed out a problem with Glenn Kessler's fact check of a claim from Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Kessler writes the fact checker feature for the Washington Post.  Romney claimed that in a normal recovery from recession the country should be adding something like 500,000 jobs per month.

counterirritant:

Kessler decided that the best way to “check” this was determine how frequently 500,000 jobs were created in a month in the last 65 year.

The post goes on to very effectively criticize Kessler's methodology throughout.

By a funny coincidence (general leftward lean of the mainstream media, maybe?), PolitiFact used very similar reasoning on the same claim:

Is 500,000 jobs created per month normal for a recovery?

The short answer is "no."

We arrived at this conclusion by looking at the net monthly change in jobs all the way back to 1970. Since Romney was referring to total jobs, rather than private-sector jobs only, we used total jobs as our measurement. And since Romney was talking about job creation patterns during a recovery, we looked only at job creation figures for non-recessionary periods, as defined by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Finally, we excluded the current recovery.

The Kessler/PolitiFact method is entirely wrongheaded.

Romney didn't claim that 500,000 jobs created per month was a normal figure during a recovery.  I can imagine the furrowed brows of Kessler, Louis Jacobson and other mainstream media fact checkers.  Aren't they the experts?  What am I talking about?

It's actually pretty simple.

The size of the economy changes.  If country A enters a recession losing 1 million jobs  then it takes two months to regain the lost jobs at a rate of 500,000 per month.  If country B experiences a recession losing 10 million jobs then it takes 20 months to regain them at a rate of 500,000 per month.

Not only does the size of the economy vary, but so does the depth of the recession.  The rate of recovery for lost jobs needs  to account for both factors.  Neither Kessler nor PolitiFact gave any apparent consideration to those critical criteria.  It's like comparing prices between now and the 1950s without adjusting for inflation.

The Romney campaign has made a number of statements like the 500,000 jobs claim, and they probably relate to the following chart or one like it from the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

Clipped from nytimes.com

Romney's claim almost certainly derives from the fact that post-war recoveries usually replace lost jobs much faster than the present recovery. 

So how does one check that claim?  It's not that hard.  Take the bottom point of employment, then count the number of months that it takes to get employment back up to the peak level.  Divide the number of jobs lost by the number of months it took to return to return to the employment peak at the start of the recession.  Do the same for each of the post-war recessions, then average the numbers to obtain the average job recovery time.  After all of that, divide the number of jobs lost from the 2007 recession by the averaged job recovery time.

Why didn't the Washington Post or PolitiFact do anything remotely resembling the fact check I just described?  It could be gross incompetence.  It could be ideological bias.  Or it could be both.





Correction 6/7/2012  Removed a redundant division operation from the next-to-last paragraph

Tales of the unexpected, featuring PolitiFact

You have to love PolitiFact's fact-challenged statements about itself.


Now:

We’ve consistently ruled in the past that the economy is too complex to assign full blame (or credit) for job gains or losses to a president or a governor  

Then:

Our ruling

Pelosi compared a select time frame in the Obama administration against the entire length of the Bush administration -- a methodology that treats the two presidents unequally. The irony is that if she had used better methodology, she would have had a sounder argument that more private-sector jobs were created under Obama than under the Bush administration. For her general point, we give Pelosi some credit. For her methodological sins -- repeated at least three times -- we give her thumbs down. On balance, we rate her statement Half True.

There's consistency for you.

The NRCC makes a statement that's correct but represents cherry picking and gets a "Barely True."  Nancy Pelosi makes a statement that's also correct, represents cherry picking and gets a "Half True"--with no mention of docking Pelosi for crediting President Obama.  On the contrary, PolitiFact itself recommends an alternative method for giving President Obama credit for his job creation numbers compared to those of his predecessor.

PolitiFact 2011: A review

PolitiFact Bias has now spent approximately a full year highlighting criticisms of the PolitiFact fact checking brand.

Our hopes that PolitiFact would improve its performance in light of outside criticism have gone largely unfulfilled.  Perhaps the biggest improvement was the reconciliation of two differing definitions of the "Half True" rating, but that modest accomplishment occurred without any announcement or acknowledgment at all from PolitiFact.  By contrast, PolitiFact wrote extensively about its momentous change in calling its fourth rating from the top "Mostly False" rather than "Mostly True" even though the definition remained the same.

Here's a rundown of the issues that should keep discerning readers from trusting PolitiFact:

1)  PolitiFact persistently ignores the effects of selection bias.  It simply isn't plausible that editors who are very probably predominantly liberal will choose stories of interest on a neutral basis without some systematic check on ideological bias.  PolitiFact, for example, continues to publish candidate report cards as though selection bias has no effect on the report card data.

2)  PolitiFact continues to publish obviously non-objective stories without employing the journalistic custom of using labels like "commentary," "opinion" or even "news analysis."  Readers are implicitly led to believe that stories like an editorial "Lie of the Year" selection are objective news stories.

3)  PolitiFact continues to routinely apply its principles of analysis unevenly, as with its interpretation of job creation claims (are the claims assumed to refer to gross job creation or net job creation?).

4)  PolitiFact has yet to shake its penchant for snark.  Snark has no place in objective reporting (see #2 above).  Unfortunately, PolitiFact treats it like a selling point instead of a weakness, and PolitiFact's intentional use of it has apparently influenced Annenberg Fact Check to follow suit.

There is a silver lining.  PolitiFact's methods produce perhaps the best opportunity yet to objectively measure mainstream media bias.  Some of those projects will be published at PolitiFact Bias over the coming year, with the study specifics available through Google Docs.

Handicapping PolitiFact's "Lie of the Year" (Updated x2)

It's that time of year again.  PolitiFact has released its finalists for the non-coveted "Lie of the Year" award.

The contestants, in the order PolitiFact presents them:

Congressional Republicans have introduced dozens of bills on social issues and other topics, but "zero on job creation."

I give this one no shot at winning.  It's just not going to resonate with PolitiFact's readers, first because liberals may well think it true and second because it was a type of Facebook spam.  It would be the equivalent of giving the award to a chain email.

The stimulus created "zero jobs." 

This is a fine choice to finish in the top five.  Liberals pretty much have to believe that the stimulus worked or else admit that their signature policy in response to the "Great Recession" was a flop.  Attacking the claim that the stimulus created zero jobs helps serve that purpose.  And it's easy to ignore the fact that the claim was very probably referring to net jobs.  Claims like this one, juxtaposed with White House claims about the ARRA, help point out the emptiness of the administration's claims.  Who cares how many jobs it creates if the overall result if a net loss in jobs?  That reflects a failed policy.

President Obama "went around the world and apologized for America."

This claim by Mitt Romney also has a great chance to finish in the top five, especially if liberals regard Romney as a likely bet to win the nomination as the Republican presidential candidate. This "Pants on Fire" rating is notable because one of the experts PolitiFact consulted on the story flat out supported Romney.

Says the vaccine to prevent HPV can cause mental retardation.

Though liberals have a thing for Michele Bachmann, this statement has no chance of winning unless it is perceived as a key reason why Bachmann had no staying power in the race for the Republican presidential nomination.  I don't see it that way, but then again I'm no liberal.

Scientists are "questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change. … (It is) more and more being put into question."

Global warming remains a hot-button issue with liberals, so Rick Perry's statement about global warming has an excellent shot at ending in the top five.

"What I have done -- and this is unprecedented ... is I've said to each agency ... 'look at regulations that are already on the books and if they don't make sense, let's get rid of them.'"

This claim seems like tossing a bone to conservatives.  Obama is to some extent to conservatives as Bush was to liberals, or as Bachmann is today--the easy target.  But who really thinks this faux pas was significant regardless of how much precedent accompanied Obama's review policy?  I certainly don't.  Don't look for this one to receive many votes.  It occurs as a finalist to symbolize PolitiFact's fairness.

By advocating new requirements for voters to show ID cards at the polls, Republicans "want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws."

Debbie Wasserman Schultz actually does fill the Bachmann role for the Democratic Party.  She's rapidly forging her own legend of rhetorical excess.  And since this one's a doozy it does stand a decent chance of hitting the top five.  Conservatives will vote for this partly based on Wasserman Schultz's overall history and figure she's deserving.  Democrats can feel comfortable throwing her overboard because they can condemn her rhetoric without making their policies look bad.

"Seniors will have to find $12,500 for health care because Republicans voted to end Medicare."

This claim also has a good shot at hit at hitting the top five for some of the same reasons cited for Wasserman Schultz's contender status.  On the downside for PolitiFact, Republicans can make it an election issue and potentially move votes.

Abortion services are "well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does."

Senator Jon Kyle's statement on abortion is about as important as Obama's "unprecedented" review policy, but Kyl could do well in the voting depending on how much liberals perceive abortion a a lightning-rod issue this election season.  But I'll be surprised if this one ranks in the top five either among PolitiFact editors or among PolitiFact's readers.

"I didn't raise taxes once."

This one's true in the Clintonesque sense!  Obama raised taxes more than once and so can truthfully claim that he did not raise taxes (just) once.  This statement is likely to vie with Wasserman Schultz's to serve as the lone liberal representative in the final top five.  Journalists may resent Obama's implicit challenge to their willingness to call him on a statement like this one.

These predictions are just for fun, representing my sense of how the results will turn out.  Readers should not make bets based on this information as though it is gambling advice.

Update:

It's occurred to me that Obama can't win.

Even though his statement about not raising taxes at all is about as baloniful as anything, making Obama the winner of a "lie of the year" award would serve as campaign fodder in next year's election.  A nearly perfect way for PolitiFact to distance itself from a growing reputation for ideological bias in its rulings?  Yes--but can they tolerate the political cost to the Obama campaign?

I don't see it happening.  Surprise me, PolitiFact.

Wasserman Schultz is the way to go if you don't want to pick a third straight conservative.

Update 2:

I missed adding one significant Democratic Party claim to the list.  With this update I'm also trying to fix the problem with the unusual font size and appearance.

AP Spin Meter flunks logic, spins story

The Associated Press (unwittingly?) turned "Spin Meter" into a pun with today's story on a supposed inconsistency by the GOP.

The AP story, carrying Donna Cassata's byline, charges that Republicans regard defense spending as a job creator while also claiming that government spending does not create jobs.

Cassata's story contains four main problems.

First, Cassata produces very little quoted material to support her claims about what GOP politicians supposedly say.

Second, the quotations she uses fail to support the story's claim of a reversal, inconsistency or contradiction (however one wishes to interpret her claim):

Running for re-election, Rep. Howard "Buck" McKeon, R-Calif., said in February 2010 that the stimulus package did not create new jobs. In a statement about the economy and jobs now on his website, McKeon says "congressional Democrats and the administration continue to insist that we can spend our way out of this recession and create jobs, but the numbers just don't add up."

But at a hearing last week, McKeon, now the committee chairman, argued against cuts to the military, saying, "We don't spend money on defense to create jobs. But defense cuts are certainly a path to job loss, especially among our high-skilled workforces. There is no private sector alternative to compensate for the government's investment."

He later added, "While cuts to the military might reduce federal spending, they harm national security and they definitely don't lead to job growth."

There simply isn't any contradiction in McKeon's statements.

Cassata appears to simply assume the presence of a contradiction, and tries to sustain the impression for the reader's sake with stuff like this:

Asked about the competing statements, a spokesman for McKeon, Claude Chafin, said they were "not inconsistent" because the defense industry is a unique recipient of federal dollars.

Note how it is taken for granted that the statements compete with one another.  Pulling the two word snippet ("not inconsistent") from Chafin makes his response look like a thin denial if not a case of the fallacy of special pleading.

One should note that special pleading is not a fallacy where special circumstances obtain, not that McKeon ultimately needs to argue that point.

Third, and stemming from the second failure, Cassata fails to make any type of logical case for McKeon (or the GOP) offering an inconsistent view of government spending.  As McKeon made very clear in his statement, concerns over jobs lost from government cuts are separate from concerns over net job creation.

Fourth, Cassata enters the dreaded realm of liberal media bias.  By the time her story concludes it could pass for an op-ed extolling the virtues of government spending as a means of producing jobs, with that thesis reliant on the writings of a Keynesian economist with a strong record of giving money to liberal politicians.

I will emphasize that my point is not that Robert Pollin's work should not be trusted because of his partisanship.  The point is that a fact check should not arbitrarily take sides in a controversy and call it a fact check.  The truth is that Pollin's opinion has no real relevance to McKeon's consistency.  It may have relevance to McKeon's position that stimulus spending did not work, but if that's the case then Pollin should have to explain the apparently dismal results of the stimulus bill.

Conclusion:  The Spin Meter is spinning.

Grading PolitiFact (Florida): American Crossroads and the Clinton take on Obama's jobs plan

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:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The fact checkers:

Aaron Sharockman:  writer, researcher
Amy Hollyfield:  editor

Analysis:

We have here an unusual fact check in that there is no quotation at all from the supposed source of the information, the political action organization American Crossroads.  The fact check concerns accurate quotations of President Bill Clinton and the impression they create as presented in an American Crossroads political ad.

Here's the ad:




Here's the PolitiFact set up:

The ad splices together television news reports highlighting Obama's plan to raise taxes a total of $1.5 trillion over 10 years, then pivots to Clinton. "I personally don't believe we ought to be raising taxes," Clinton says in what appears to be an interview. "It won't solve the problem."

Between the lines "we ought to be raising taxes," and "it won't solve the problem," the ad jumps -- for just a split-second -- to some other image.

It's a 30 second ad, but the PolitiFact description omits a sizable portion in the beginning using President Obama's own words on taxation:  "The last thing you want to do is to raise taxes in the middle of a recession."

The ad does not merely use Clinton's words to oppose Obama's proposed tax increase.  It uses Obama's words toward the same purpose.

 PolitiFact:

The cut-away caught our attention because we've seen instances where politician's words were cut in a way that would create a different impression.

Indeed, after further review, that's what American Crossroads did here.

If PolitiFact is correct that the ad creates a different impression than did Clinton's words in context then we should expect to see PolitiFact identify the proper understanding as well as the false impression along with the supporting rationales for each.

The video of Clinton grabbed by American Crossroads comes from a 25-minute September 2011 interview Clinton did with the conservative news website Newsmax.com. The interview was set up in New York, where Clinton was holding the 10th annual meeting of his Clinton Global Initiative project.

We found the original Newsmax.com video. The two lines quoted by American Crossroads come more than three minutes apart, as Clinton was delivering a meandering answer on how to create jobs and fix the flailing American economy.

PolitiFact is correct that the statements occur more than three minutes apart.  The video confirms it.



PolitiFact:

When American Crossroads quoted Clinton as saying, "I personally don't believe we ought to be raising taxes," they clipped Clinton's full comments short. Here's the full quote, including what American Crossroads left out:

"I personally don't believe we ought to be raising taxes or cutting spending -- either one -- until we get this economy off the ground. This has been a dead flat economy. And you don't want in something this flat ... if we cut government spending, which I normally would be inclined to do when the deficit's this big, with interest rates near zero you can't get the benefits of it."

So Clinton was as much deriding spending cuts as he was a plan to raise taxes.

PolitiFact is also correct that Clinton disparaged spending cuts as well as tax increases, though it isn't clear why that would have relevance with respect to American Crossroads' use of Clinton's words.  Simply clipping Clinton's words does not misrepresent misuse, or else PolitiFact is acting hypocritically.  Note the ellipsis (...) in middle paragraph above.  In journalistic style an ellipsis indicates missing text. 

PolitiFact:

Clinton went on to praise Obama's plan to continue cuts to the payroll tax, saying it's a proven way to help the economy, before spinning off into a discussion of former President Ronald Reagan and former House Speaker Tip O'Neill.

Clinton remained on topic, praising Reagan and O'Neill for disposing of the debt from the savings and loan bailouts which in turn, by Clinton's account, corresponded with a job growth spurt during Reagan's tenure.

PolitiFact:

Later in the interview the second half of the quote comes up. But again, it's shortened.

"I would pay it," Clinton said, referring to a millionaire's tax (though Clinton said that many wealthy New Yorkers like himself wouldn't be affected because they already pay high state and local income taxes that can then be deducted from your federal tax bill).

"It's okay with me, I'd pay more," he said. "But it won't solve the problem."

We still have no rationale from PolitiFact explaining how American Crossroads took Clinton out of context and/or juxtaposed his statements to alter their meaning.  "It's shortened" doesn't cut it without an explanation as to how the shortened version significantly altered the meaning.

PolitiFact:

After the American Crossroads ad was released, Clinton fired back saying the group wrongly implied his opposition to Obama's plan to raise taxes on the wealthy -- sometimes referred to as the "Buffett Rule" -- as well as Obama's jobs plan.

"The Republican group American Crossroads has used a quote from me in a video opposing President Obama's jobs plan and the 'Buffett Rule,'" he said in the statement provided to POLITICO. "The advertisement implies that I opposed the 'Buffett Rule.' In fact, I support both the American Jobs Act and the 'Buffett Rule.' I believe that it's only fair to ask those of us in high-income groups -- who have received the primary benefits of the last decade's economic growth and the majority of its tax cuts as well -- to contribute to solving our long term debt problem.

"What I did say was that the 'Buffett Rule' cannot solve the problem alone. Reducing the debt requires three things: more economic growth, more spending cuts, and more revenue," he said.

Even if Clinton has a spotless reputation for truth-telling we don't take his explanation uncritically, do we?

In the case of the American Crossroads ad we're concerned with Obama's plan to raise taxes on the wealthy.  That is the focus of the ad.

Clinton says American Crossroads presented him falsely as opposing Obama's jobs plan.  That's a half truth.  The ad does not address any aspect of the jobs plan other than the tax increases.  The ad does not address, for example, the payroll tax decrease that Clinton praised.

Clinton further stated that American Crossroads painted him in opposition to the "Buffett Rule."  Again, that's a half truth.  The ad shows Clinton criticizing the tax increase for not addressing the creation of jobs.  It does not include any mention of Clinton's support for such a tax increase during better economic conditions nor does it try to portray Clinton as opposed to tax increases on the rich regardless of circumstances.

Clinton's statement avoids the points made in the American Crossroads ad.  Does Clinton favor raising taxes on a flat economy and does Obama's "Buffett Rule" proposal raise taxes on a flat economy?  Does the tax increase help address the jobs problem, contrary to what Clinton suggested during his interview?

PolitiFact:

American Crossroads spokesman Jonathan Collegio defended the ad's quoting of Clinton to PolitiFact Florida, noting that a 30-second ad cannot run two-minute-plus quotes and that the "quotes selected for the ad are the most succinct and relevant clips of Clinton's Newsmax interview, and fairly represent his views."

We see it differently. The ad suggests that Clinton opposes Obama's plan to raise taxes on the wealthy as a means of reducing the deficit. By our review of the interview, Clinton actually appeared to straddle that fence. At one point, he said that he didn't think the country should raise taxes "until we get this economy off the ground." At another point, he said he'd be "okay" with the tax and willing to pay it, though he said in his particular case, he probably won't be affected.

PolitiFact's review of the Clinton interview resulted in a false impression.  Clinton did not straddle the fence, though he was made to appear that way through selective quotation.

Here's an expanded version of the second statement from Clinton, my portion of the transcript in bold, portions used by PolitiFact highlighted in yellow:

What I would like to say both to Speaker Boehner and to the president, "Okay, you've both had your deal.  Go work it out.  Meanwhile focus on putting American back to work now."  Because it just confused Americans.  Americans lost the fact that, whatever you think about this millionaire's surcharge, it--I don't really care because I would pay it but it won't affect me because I already pay the minimum income because I live in New York.  So if you live, anybody that lives in New York, because our state and local taxes are so high and you get to deduct those against your federal taxes, we're already over any threshold anybody can consider.  But, I, you know, it's okay with me, I'd pay more.  But it won't solve the problem.

Clinton's thought, without the digression detailing his opinion of how it affect him, goes like this:  Americans lost the fact that, whatever you think about this millionaire's surcharge, it doesn't solve the problem.


The PolitiFact version turns an irrelevancy into a critical piece of missing information.  Clinton was saying that whether you favor increasing taxes on the rich or not, it doesn't solve the jobs problem. PolitiFact's interpretation contradicts Clinton's intent.


The American Crossroads ad segues from the Clinton quotations to another quotation critical of Obama.  Note the accompanying text in the ad:

"We need jobs not higher taxes."

It falls right into line with Clinton's criticism of Obama's tax hike proposal.  The tax hike does not address the jobs problem.

PolitiFact:

At the least, American Crossroads is guilty of cherry-picking parts of Clinton's statement to best fit into the narrative of its ad. But we think they go one step further by cutting out critical pieces of evidence -- namely that Clinton said he would be "okay" with higher taxes for the wealthy and that he'd pay additional taxes if he was required to.

Clinton's voice and image were no doubt selected specifically because it'd be a stinging rebuke of Obama's policies -- from a fellow Democrat.

But viewer beware. We rate this claim False.

As explained above, PolitiFact miscategorized the evidence from the context.  Clinton's general support for taxing the rich at higher rates, by his own words, does not mitigate the failure of the tax increases to address the jobs problem, and the latter was the focus of the American Crossroads ad.

With full consideration of the context it's hard to see any significant flaw in the ad's use of the Clinton quotations.  The biggest failing is the juxtaposition of one quotation concerned with the weak economy while the other was focused on jobs.  Given that the two are closely linked a criticism along those lines seems like hairsplitting.

On top of everything else, it's extraordinarily difficult to see how PolitiFact could justify a "False" rating for this item.  As noted, American Crossroads doesn't make any sort of concrete claim.  The ad in question simply quotes President Clinton.  And the quotations are apparently perfectly accurate.  If they were taken entirely out of context to mean the opposite of what Clinton intended then PolitiFact's definitions of "Half True" or "Mostly False" (formerly "Barely True") appear to fit better than the "False" rating:

HALF TRUE – The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context.

BARELY TRUE – The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression.

FALSE – The statement is not accurate.

The tag "journalists reporting badly" will apply.

The grades:

Aaron Sharockman: F

Amy Hollyfield: F

Grading PolitiFact: Nancy Pelosi and The Great Job Creator

When we find we've made a mistake, we correct the mistake.
--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:

Back in July of this year I published the observation that PolitiFact uses wildly inconsistent criteria when evaluating job creation claims.  PolitiFact sometimes finds it important to distinguish between job creation and net increases in the number of jobs:

Our research took us down a road traveled by PolitiFact Texas in examining various claims from Perry that most of the jobs created in the U.S. are in the Lone Star State.

PolitiFact Texas has debunked several of these eye-popping claims, noting that they are based on statistics from a minority of states that have had overall job gains in recent years.

I likewise noted how the inconsistency tended to benefit Democrats while harming Republicans.

Is the distinction important to PolitiFact in this case involving Pelosi?

Let's find out, taking it from the top:

During a Sept. 17, 2011, edition of the MSNBC show Up with Chris Hayes, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., offered a defense of the U.S. economy’s job creation record during President Barack Obama’s tenure.

"When President (George W.) Bush was president for those eight years with those tax policies, we lost jobs," Pelosi said. "In fact, more jobs were created in the second year -- that would be last year -- in the private-sector in the Obama administration than in the eight years of the Bush administration. And they want us to repeat those tax cuts at the high end which, again, did not create jobs, but they did deepen the deficit."

Pelosi makes no apparent attempt to distinguish between net job creation and gross job creation, though in fairness to her it is just as clear what she's talking about in context as it is in the other cases PolitiFact evaluated.

Unfortunately for Pelosi, it's also pretty obvious that she's blaming the job losses near the end of Bush's second term on tax policies implemented during his first term--a classic case of misleading with cherry-picked stats.  To accept her reasoning we would have to rule out the deflation of the housing bubble and the associated problems in the derivatives market as causes for those job losses.

PolitiFact calls Pelosi on the cherry-picking yet somehow succeeds in making it appear that Pelosi makes a good point (bold emphases added):

Pelosi’s statement from last weekend continues the cherry-picking approach: She cited numbers only for jobs created in 2010.

Using the period January 2010 to December 2010, the number of private-sector jobs increased by more than 1.2 million. If Pelosi had used more current numbers, she actually would have had a stronger case: From January 2010 to August 2011, the increase in jobs was almost twice as big -- nearly 2.4 million.

Even the smaller of these two numbers beats Bush’s eight-year jobs increase -- but she continues to conveniently ignore the first year of the Obama administration. If you take the entirety of Obama’s term -- January 2009 to August 2011 -- the nation has lost 1.8 million jobs, which is still worse than what happened under Bush.

Nadeam Elshami, a spokesman for Pelosi, argues that it’s proper to keep the first year of Obama’s tenure out of the equation.

Elshami's rationale is priceless owing to its bankruptcy:

"Republicans may wish to wipe the slate clean and forget about the financial crisis that nearly destroyed our economy and the recession that began under President Bush," said Elshami, a spokesman for Pelosi. "The figures are correct and clearly demonstrate that private-sector jobs are being created, but not fast enough – we have much more to do, and we urge Republicans to join us to pass President Obama’s American Jobs Act."

Far from wanting to forget about the financial crisis, Republicans would want to point out its existence in order to undermine Pelosi's apples-to-oranges comparison.

But again we find PolitiFact offering a torqued corrective (bold emphasis added):

We understand the impulse to make such adjustments, but in Pelosi’s formulation, this principle is applied unequally. If the first year of the Bush administration, which also included a recession, were excluded from her calculation-- this would have magically erased a loss of 2.4 million jobs under Bush. The next seven years of the Bush presidency would have shown a gain of nearly 1.8 million jobs, rather than a loss of 653,000 for the full eight-year period.

Interestingly, if Pelosi had started the count for each president at the beginning of the second year of their presidencies, it would not only have been more defensible methodologically, but it would have also backed up Pelosi's argument better. Leaving out the first year for each president, private-sector job growth under Obama would have been 2.4 million, compared to 1.8 million under Bush.

However, in none of the three statements by Pelosi that we've fact-checked did Pelosi use that method.

If we simply cut out the first year for each president then Bush is relieved of the effects of one recession on job creation while leaving the effects of a second recession.  Obama simply has recessions cut cleanly away.  And that would support Pelosi's argument?  Nonsense.  It leaves us with more apples and oranges.


PolitiFact:

Pelosi compared a select time frame in the Obama administration against the entire length of the Bush administration -- a methodology that treats the two presidents unequally. The irony is that if she had used better methodology, she would have had a sounder argument that more private-sector jobs were created under Obama than under the Bush administration. For her general point, we give Pelosi some credit. For her methodological sins -- repeated at least three times -- we give her thumbs down. On balance, we rate her statement Half True.

In the conclusion we again see PolitiFact trying to push Pelosi's underlying argument even while they criticize her details:  "For her general point, we give Pelosi some credit."  That point doesn't fly even with PolitiFact's spin added.

Because of Pelosi's "methodological sins" PolitiFact drops her down to "Half True"--yet PolitiFact Virginia gave Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia a "Barely True" grade for a claim that was otherwise accurate by the numbers and in terms of its underlying argument simply for his failure to distinguish between gross job creation and net job creation:

But the Virginia governor used net job numbers. Those are different from job creation figures, which are not compiled by the BLS or other national authority. So using net job numbers and calling them job creation figures is a case of comparing apples to oranges.

We rate McDonnell’s claim Barely True.

PolitiFact's rating of Pelosi stands as incredibly generous considering that her point comparing the tax policy of Bush with that of Obama finds absolutely no support in either her version or the PolitiFact spin version.


The grades:

Louis Jacobson:  F
Martha Hamilton:  F

Pelosi's methodological sins barely eclipsed those of the PolitiFact team, and Pelosi didn't have the temerity to call her statement a fact check.


Afters:

Here's a little update on the winners and losers with respect to PolitiFact's favoritism:

Helped by omission
 Rick Perry (True)
 Terry McAuliffe (True)
 Carolyn Maloney (True)
 Brian Moran (True)
 Mitt Romney (True)
 Austan Goolsbee (Mostly True)
 Ed Gillespie (Mostly True)
 Joe Biden (Mostly True)
 Nancy Pelosi (Half True)
 Nancy Pelosi (Half True)
 Debbie Wasserman Schultz (Half True)
 Rick Scott (Half True)
 Tim Pawlenty (Pants on Fire; harmed by omission?)
 John Boehner (False; harmed by omission)

Harmed by inclusion:
 Texas Public Policy Foundation (Half True)
 Rod Smith (False)
 Rick Perry (False)
 Bob McDonnell (Barely True)
 Rick Scott (Pants on Fire)




Correction:  Had incorrect links for the Rick Perry ratings in two spots.  Hat tip to "KnocksvilleE" for pointing out the problem.

Bwahahahaha

Yes, I'm on record describing Paul Krugman (economist, New York Times op-ed hack) as a partisan hack.  Sorry for any redundancy.

If we need another reminder as to why that epithet sticks, check out the Kaus Files (at the Daily Caller):

Paul Krugman now says that some kinds of Keynesian stimulus spending just aren’t as effective as other kinds. Specifically, he suggests, aid to state and local governments (to enable them to keep government workers in their jobs) is a sort of second-class stimulus:

So what happened to the stimulus? Much of it consisted of tax cuts, not spending. Most of the rest consisted either of aid to distressed families or aid to hard-pressed state and local governments. This aid may have mitigated the slump, but it wasn’t the kind of job-creation program we could and should have had. [E.A.]

Hmm. That’s not what I remember him saying back in 2009. In 2009, if I remember right, job-preserving aid to state and local governments was almost the most important thing in the world.

What.  A.  Great.  Economist.

Be sure to follow the link and read Kaus' post in its entirety, as it provides the evidence in support of the finding that Krugman reversed himself.

Hat tip to Hot Air.

Grading PolitiFact (Virginia): Bob McDonnell and job creation in Texas

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:

(clipped from PolitiFact.com)

The fact checkers:

Jacob Geiger:  writer, researcher
Warren Fiske:  editor


Analysis:

Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) of Virginia wouldn't mind if his state could emulate the jobs record of Texas.  McDonnell, in an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, made a recent statement praising Texas on that point.

"Under Gov. Rick Perry’s leadership [Texas] has created more jobs over the last decade than the rest of the states combined," McDonnell wrote.

And PolitiFact was there:

We wondered if Perry’s record on creating jobs matched McDonnell’s claim.

With the fact check identified, it is research time. PolitiFact contacted McDonnell's office for backing information before launching its own survey:

Our research took us down a road traveled by PolitiFact Texas in examining various claims from Perry that most of the jobs created in the U.S. are in the Lone Star State.

PolitiFact Texas has debunked several of these eye-popping claims, noting that they are based on statistics from a minority of states that have had overall job gains in recent years.

Though PolitiFact Virginia mentions "several" claims debunked by PolitiFact Texas, we have but one represented in the list of references.  PolitiFact Texas debunked Governor Perry to the tune of "Half True" in that case, and that story contained a link to another story featuring a claim similar to the current subject where the claim received a "False" rating.

PolitiFact, you see, pays special attention to the words politicians use.  If they say "we created x jobs" it does not necessarily mean net jobs.  And that's misleading.

Unless you're Rick Perry:

"Gov. Rick Perry says Texas has created more than 850,000 jobs, more than the other states combined" ("True")

Or Joe Biden:

"Vice President Joe Biden says more jobs were created in the last year than in all eight years under George Bush" ("MostlyTrue")

Or Mitt Romney:

"Mitt Romney tells CPAC that Canada created more jobs in January than the U.S. did" ("True")

Or Debbie Wasserman Schultz:

"Debbie Wasserman Schultz says job creation in 2010 on pace to eclipse growth during George W. Bush's entire administration" ("Half True)

You get the idea, after noting that Wasserman Schultz's "Half True" had nothing at all to do with gross job creation as opposed to net job creation.  The fact is that "job creation" is a statistic that we normally take to mean net job creation.  Yet PolitiFact applies an uncharitable interpretation to job creation statements from governors McDonnell and Perry with no apparent justification from the context.

PolitiFact Texas:

Veronica Sanchez Downey, who analyzes data for the commission, said she'd feel comfortable summarizing the commission's conclusion about Texas job gains this way: "Of all the states that gained jobs in the U.S. including the District of Columbia, Texas accounted for" 67.2 percent of the added jobs from November 2007 to November 2008. The 67.2-percent figure reflects adjustments of the data since the initial research.

Perry, of course, didn't say it that way.

Right.  Perry did not mention the term "net" while talking about job gains.  He just talked about job gains, which people tend to understand as net job gains.  That interpretation is so ubiquitous that PolitiFact typically favors it without discussion, as shown by the preceding examples.  So Perry gets "debunked" by making an exception to the normal conventions of English interpretation.

You might get more consistent results using the "Magic 8 Ball" instead of PolitiFact.

Let's get this over with:

Let’s review. 

McDonnell wrote that under Gov. Perry, Texas "has created more jobs over the last decade than the rest of the states combined."

But the Virginia governor used net job numbers. Those are different from job creation figures, which are not compiled by the BLS or other national authority. So using net job numbers and calling them job creation figures is a case of comparing apples to oranges.

We rate McDonnell’s claim Barely True.

It's just too bad for McDonnell that PolitiFact Virginia failed to take note of the several PolitiFact items that treated job creation claims in terms of net jobs, with ratings ranging from as low as "Half True" to as high as "True."

Reply hazy.  Try again.

The grades:

Jacob Geiger:  F
Warren Fiske:  F

Fiske and Geiger had the opportunity to notice PolitiFact's disgraceful inconsistency in its treatment of job creation claims.  The team somehow failed to notice PolitiFact's history of (appropriately) treating job creation claims as dealing with net job creation where the context warrants taking them that way.  The PolitiFact Virginia team instead zeroed in on a handful of bizarre cases where the obvious intent was ignored.

Afters:

What if we were to look at cases where PolitiFact has ruled on jobs claims and where considering the jobs claims in terms of gross jobs rather than net jobs might have affected the ruling?

Grading PolitiFact: Newt Gingrich and the "food stamp president"

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
Bill Adair:  editor

Analysis:

This fact check reminds me of the job the same PolitiFact team (Jacobson, Adair) did on conservative pundit Laura Ingraham on the same day.

Sometimes it doesn't matter what you say.  It just matters what fact PolitiFact wants to check.

Here we go again:

On the May 15, 2011, edition of NBC’s Meet the Press, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich defended his earlier characterization of President Barack Obama as "the most successful food stamp president in American history."

Host David Gregory first showed a clip of Gingrich’s earlier comment, made at a Georgia Republican Party dinner.

As with the Ingraham fact check, the beginning's not half bad.  And the similarity persists with the subsequent decline:

"You want to be a country that creates food stamps, in which case frankly Obama's is an enormous success," Gingrich said in the recorded excerpt. "The most successful food stamp president in American history.  Or do you want to be a country that creates paychecks?"

Gregory went on to ask Gingrich if his statement had "racist overtones."  Journalists are great.

Gingrich waved off that question.

PolitiFact:

Gregory responded, "What did you mean? What was the point?"

Gingrich replied, "That's, that's bizarre. That -- this kind of automatic reference to racism, this is the president of the United States. The president of the United States has to be held accountable. Now, the idea that -- and what I said is factually true.  Forty-seven million Americans are on food stamps.  One out of every six Americans is on food stamps."

From there, PolitiFact zeroed in the the 47 million figure and went about its fact check.  This time they remembered to check the underlying point, which they identified as Gingrich blaming Obama for the record number of people receiving food stamps.

I wish I was kidding.

PolitiFact's approach to the fact check is profoundly wrongheaded.  Note the exchange between Gregory and Gingrich immediately subsequent to the portion PolitiFact used:

MR. GREGORY:  Well, what did you mean?

REP. GINGRICH:  Well, it's very simple.  He has policies--and I used a very direct analogy.  He follows the same destructive political model that destroyed the city of Detroit.  I follow the model that Rick Perry and others have used to create more jobs in Texas.  You know, Texas two out of the last four years created more jobs than the other 49 states combined.  I'm suggesting we know how to create jobs.  Ronald Reagan did it.  I was part of that.  We know how to create jobs.  We did it when I was speaker.  And, and the way you create jobs is you have lower taxes, you have less regulation, you have litigation reform.  When the New York Stock Exchange puts its headquarters at Amsterdam, Holland and, by the way, follows 40 other companies in the last year; when General Electric pays zero in taxes; there's something fundamentally wrong with the current system.  The Obama system of the National Labor Relations Board basically breaking the law to try to punish Boeing and to threaten every right-to-work state.  The Environmental Protection Agency trying to control the entire American economy by bureaucratic fiat.  The Obama system's going to lead us down the path to Detroit and destruction.  I think we need a brand-new path.  It's a path of job creation.  And one of the central themes of this campaign is going to be paychecks vs. food stamps.

msnbc transcript

If PolitiFact paid attention to "the full context, the comments made before and after it, the question that prompted it, and the point the person was trying to make," it's certainly difficult to tell from the finished work.  The PolitiFact story offers no hint of Gingrich's full answer to Gregory's repeat of the question.


PolitiFact:

We're not going to address the racial implications but decided to check Gingrich's main comment. We see two points to investigate. First, are Gingrich’s numbers accurate? And second, is it fair to blame Obama for today's high use of food stamps?

PolitiFact does not address the racial implications.  I'm speechless.

It's fair to check Gingrich's figure of 47 million on food stamps.  But Gingrich does not blame Obama for the number of people on food stamps.  Rather, he used food stamps as an "analogy" (metaphor's more like it) to Obama's approach of relying on government action rather than private initiative.  It isn't that Obama gave out food stamps, it's that he did not pursue successful job-creating policies.  PolitiFact somehow must have missed Gingrich's explanation while hastening to figure out if Obama is to blame for the number of food stamp recipients.

As it turns out, the SNAP program has 44.2 million beneficiaries, so Gingrich was a bit high with his number.  Gingrich likely conflated food stamps with poverty, since the numbers he used match the numbers used in news reports for the latter.  Be that as it may, the number of recipients Gingrich mentioned represents an inflation of 6.3 percent and PolitiFact makes no big deal of that degree of inaccuracy.

PolitiFact's subsequent foray into the blame game misses the point, as noted above, so we'll skip to the end to see how it turns out:

Gingrich was close on the numbers of Americans receiving SNAP benefits. In addition, the number of beneficiaries is at a record level, and it has risen every month of the Obama presidency. On the other hand, Gingrich oversimplifies when he suggests that Obama should be considered "the most successful food stamp president in American history," because much -- though probably not all -- of the reason for the increase was a combination of the economic problems Obama inherited and a longstanding upward trend from policy changes. On balance, we rate Gingrich’s statement Half True.

One cannot rightly rate something "on balance" when the evaluation itself is unbalanced.

Gingrich's analogy does not even require record-setting numbers of food-stamp recipients.  His point, as he stated, was the nature of Obama's approach to job creation.

(chart clipped from data.bls.gov)

With the unemployment rate high along with the number of food stamp recipients, it's hard to argue with Gingrich's point.  Calling it "racist" might be the most effective defense.

The grades:

Louis Jacobson:  F
Bill Adair:  F

If this PolitiFact team could miss the obvious context of Gingrich's statement, I have even more confidence that they succeeded in similarly botching the Ingraham fact check.  In the latter case I have yet to locate the missing context.


May 18, 2011:  Went with "Gingrich waved off that question" rather than "Gingrich waved off that comment" and altered tense in a number of places.  Restored the gone-missing quote of the final paragraph from the PolitiFact story and added a hotlink to my review of the Ingraham story.