Right now, everyone’s in campaign mode. All the guns, all the cylinders are being fired at once. This is the quadrennial “big f*ckin’ deal” as Joe Biden would say. So perhaps it’s not the right time to pose this question…but then again, given that election times tend to represent unique opportunities to put pressure on candidates, perhaps it’s the perfect time.
On the subject of Social Security:
Bad:
First, for future generations of seniors, Mitt believes that the retirement age should be slowly increased to account for increases in longevity.
~ Mitt Romney, campaign website
Worse:
All other workers will have a choice to stay in the current system or begin contributing to personal accounts. Those who choose the personal account option will have the opportunity to begin investing a significant portion of their payroll taxes into a series of funds managed by the U.S. government.
~ Paul Ryan, Roadmap for America’s Future
MUCH Better! (not to mention VERY definitive):
I guarantee you, flat guarantee you, there will be no changes in Social Security. I flat guarantee you.
~ Joe Biden, 8/14/12
…and finally, on October 3rd — a full six weeks’ after Biden’s very clear and reassuring statement — come on, Mr. President, bring it on home!
I suspect that on Social Security, we’ve got a somewhat similar position. Social Security is structurally sound. It’s going to have to be tweaked the way it was by Ronald Reagan and Speaker — Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill.
~ Barack Obama (to Mitt Romney), first Presidential debate, 10/3/12
In a word, AAAAAAARRRRGH.
And yes, Obama fans, the President did hedge his remarks by mouthing the boilerplate used by all politicians who do not wish their career cut short from being electrocuted by the “third rail of American politics” (Obama said SS was basically “structurally sound”). But the operative words in Obama’s quote up there are in bold: he told 60 million Americans simultaneously that a) his position on Social Security was similar to Mitt Romney’s (who says his and Ryan’s are similar), and b) Social Security “will need to be tweaked.”
I’m sorry, Obama fans: “flat guarantee you: there will be no changes” just isn’t compatible with “will need to be tweaked.” Anyone else still wondering how (and how quickly) the administration will attempt to square this circle, assuming the Obama/Biden ticket wins another term?
*** 10/16 – SEE UPDATE BELOW; ROMNEY FINALLY RELEASES DETAILS OF TAX PLAN***
Did I say STUDIES? I meant blog posts.
Back at the beginning of August, the non-partisan Tax Policy Center issued a much-discussed study that was the first to try to run the numbers on Mitt Romney’s tax plan. Specifically, they wanted to see whether Romney’s claim to be able to leave the Bush tax cuts in place and then cut taxes by an additional 20% across the board would work, in light of Romney’s promise that he would make up for the revenue lost by such a tax cut without having to raise taxes on the middle class. Unsurprisingly, the TPC was therefore also the first to come to the conclusion – also much discussed since their study in late August – that the math on Romney’s promises simply didn’t add up.
Part of this guesswork and extrapolation has come from the fact that the Romney campaign steadfastly refuses to get specific about exactly HOW they will make up the lost revenue without either adding to the deficit or soaking the middle class (or poor). In the absence of genuine specifics from the Romney campaign, the TPC had to make some assumptions, based upon likely economic conditions, as well as on the things Romney HAS definitely said. So they did. And then they re-jiggered those assumptions to be as favorable and generous to Romney as they could be without departing from reality.
Even then, they still found that Romney’s promises, taken together, are simply not mathematically possible.
In an election season, them’s fighting words. Having a difference of opinion about various policies is the stuff electoral politics is made of. But saying a candidate’s plans are mathematically impossible is of another order: pundits and the press take notice, and the public pays more attention, too, since such a statement carries with it the implicit accusation that the candidate is intentionally lying.
In the intervening time, a great deal of ink on the right side of the political aisle has been spilled attempting to debunk the TPC study. One of the parties most interested in debunking the study is, unsurprisingly, the Romney campaign itself. Within days, the campaign began claiming to have “six other studies” that said Romney’s policies WOULD work without raising the deficit or raising taxes on the middle class or the poor. Throughout most of September and right up through the first Presidential debate and the VP debate, the Romney team stayed remarkably on-message about this: they have one study, we have SIX that say the opposite.
What WERE these studies? The Romney campaign didn’t say, initially. Journalists were able to conclude what the campaign likely was referring to, based on what the campaign did refer to when discussing tax policy, but Romney and his team were never explicit about where these “six studies” came from, or who did them.
Until now.
Josh Barro, who did some of the original press-work about the original TPC study and the subsequent back-and-forth with the Romney campaign, finally got them to go on-record about where he could find these “six studies” which all show the TPC study of August to be false, and Mitt Romney’s tax plan to be viable without ballooning the deficit or hurting the non-rich with additional taxes. Are you ready? The studies, according to Romney via Barro, are “…perhaps more accurately described as ‘analyses’, since four of them are blog posts or op-eds. I’m not hating — I blog for a living — but I don’t generally describe my posts as ‘studies’.” More interestingly, “[n]one of the analyses do what Romney’s campaign says: show that his tax plan is sound.”
You don’t say.
The sources (“studies”, if you believe the Romney campaign) are these: a blog post by Alex Brill at AEI (a conservative think-tank), a second blog post from AEI (this one by Matt Jensen), two pieces by Martin Feldstein (one an op-ed at the Wall Street Journal and the other a blog post), and two papers, one by Curtis Dubay of the Heritage Foundation, and the other by Princeton professor Harvey Rosen. Barro goes through these sources one-by-one, explaining why each does not show what Romney claims it does, in detail. It’s illuminating reading, I would guess especially if you’re someone who’s not already familiar with Mitt Romney’s casual relationship with the facts/truth. If you’re not familiar, the mere fact that, of Romney’s “six studies,” only two are even anything approaching an actual study, ought to give you a pretty good indication.
I won’t post Barro’s analysis here, because that’s what his piece is for. If you read it, though, you won’t be in any further doubt about whether the Tax Policy Center’s study was correct in its conclusions. It was.
***UPDATE*** – Hold, I say HOLD, those presses! Mitt Romney’s campaign, under relentless pressure has finally made the calculated decision to release the full details of how his tax plan will be achieved without either ballooning the debt or taxing the middle class and poor. Read the details at Romney Tax Plan.
I sometimes forget that the email address I used to sign up for Obama campaign updates (almost exclusively fundraising appeals these days) gets filtered into its own special folder in my email inbox, because otherwise it’s simply too annoying to deal with the daily volume of email from that single source, this close to election day. So it wasn’t until today that I thought to check that folder, and found this after-debate appeal from the President’s campaign:
If you want to be president of the United States, you have got to be willing to stand up and tell the American people the truth.
Mitt Romney had a chance to do just that the other night, and he chose a different path.
Rather than own up to his plan for $5 trillion worth of tax cuts for the wealthy that he’s spent more than a year talking about, he denied it. Instead of telling the truth about his plan to turn Medicare into a voucher program, he dodged the question. And given the chance to explain how he’d “replace” Obamacare, he offered no plan.
Oh, boy. I could feel my blood start to boil as soon as I read that – I didn’t even need to get down to the ubiquitous hat-passing appeal for more of my money. This was my reply:
Look, I know you’re deathly afraid of coming off in a way that will let Sean Hannity portray you as the “angry black man.” And not without reason. But as Jon Stewart of all people put it on Thursday after that turd of a performance you turned in, shouldn’t you display at least as much of the “fired-up, ready to go” spirit and sense of urgency as you request of your email list volunteers? It’s just too early for you to start playing to not-lose, to start taking a knee and running out the clock.
Jesus Christ, Barack, going into that debate on Wednesday, everyone agreed that if Romney had a bad, or even just an OK night, and you had a good one where you really held his feet to the fire, you’d make the trending-downwards of the Romney campaign permanent. You’d “put him away.” Instead, you proved Chris frigging Christie right when he took his wide, bloviating ass onto the talk shows in the pre-debate days and arrogantly proclaimed that Mitt Romney was going to wipe the floor with you.
And yes, you did win in the “honesty” category. And yes, it sucks that since 1960, the press have discovered (and in fact actually CELEBRATE) that their source of employment itself – the media – can make candidates President on the basis of who had the better hair or smile rather than who had the better arguments and policies. But for crying out loud, it isn’t as if this is exactly new information you or your supposed campaign professionals are only now having to adjust to on the fly, in the moment. You knew it going into that debate; that’s the way it’s been now for fifty years. But instead of bringing the kind of enthusiasm you regularly (though not always) display on the stump, you gave the nation (many of them tuning in for the first time to the campaign that evening) Professor Obama, the 3D chess player and detached, bored leader of a diffident class of freshmen students.
Mitt Romney kept lobbing meatball after meatball over the heart of the plate, the kind of lies that just BEGGED to be swatted into the third deck…and you just kept standing there taking pitches.
What. The. Hell.
Go out there and act like you want to win this thing. Because if you don’t act like that, why the hell should anyone else?
The Obama campaign’s email continued on with this final bit of insanity:
Debates are one factor, but you need to remember: what he or I say in those debates will not decide this election.
Breathtaking, in its insipidness, isn’t it? I mean, think about that sentence for a moment. After an election – especially if one is on the losing side – there’s a tendency to stir the ashes, to keep doing autopsy after autopsy and analysis after analysis, trying to figure out what went wrong, what that magic “one factor” was that swung the painfully close election into your opponent’s column and sent your candidate to the showers. All such post-facto scab-picking is of course useless in the “no-sense-crying-over-spilled-milk” sense of the word. But something campaigns or their supporters seem to fail to notice is that aside from the futility of playing the “shoulda, woulda, coulda” game, the other undeniable truth in any such close loss is that almost any of the factors that swung the opponent’s way can be said to have been “the deciding factor.”
When George W. Bush won by the slimmest of margins in 2000 (leaving aside that in many ways, it was the SCOTUS and not the voters who (s)elected him), such agonized, after-action analysis was at its height. The favorite scapegoat for Al Gore’s loss was of course Ralph Nader. And, with a loss of 537 votes in Florida, certainly the 90,000 Nader voters in the Sunshine state can have been said to have “made the difference” between President Gore and President Bush. But it’s equally true that if Al Gore had been able to win his OWN STATE, Florida would not have mattered (Presidents almost never lose their home states; both 2000 and again this year are outliers in that regard — Mitt Romney is behind by as much as thirty points in Massachusetts). Others pointed to electronic voting machine irregularities in Ohio, or any number of other factors that, had that one factor been different, would have resulted in a President Gore. Here’s the thing (and the reason why such noodling is pointless after a loss): they are ALL true. Yup, had any one of those things been different, we’d have had a different President in 2001. And because this is true, it makes it patently silly to claim that this or that specific factor was THE thing that cost Gore the election. It ALL matters.
That’s why this Obama letter – especially that last sentence I quoted – is so noxious. Because in their blizzard of email to supporters, the Obama campaign at least pretends to know this: they say things like “the call you make today to a voter in Ohio or Iowa or Florida may make the difference.” When it comes time to ask their supporters for money or volunteer time or even simply enthusiasm, the Obama campaign seems to understand full well that there IS a threshold between winning and losing, and that indeed everything that helps the campaign is a factor in getting them across that threshold and into a second term.
Which is why it’s borderline insulting for them to claim that a thuddingly bad debate performance by the President which was viewed by some sixty million Americans supposedly “will not decide this election.”
Bullshit, Barack – and you know it. If the race is truly close, it may very well be that everyone from you and whichever one of your staff wrote this email to the “professional left” that you allow your campaign to so roundly ridicule may be sitting around in the days after a President Romney is elected, each offering up that one factor out of hundreds which “was the deciding factor.” If you lose in November by a handful of votes in Florida or Ohio after having had the momentum trending in your direction up until last Wednesday, it will certainly be valid to note that was the day you lost.
Last thing: of course you and your staff are right, that virtually all independent journalists and fact-checkers agree that Mitt Romney lied his way through Wednesday night. But allowing Thursday-morning fact-checkers to do what you should have done in the moment is not only vastly less effective, it’s a paler version of the same kind of “coulda, woulda, shoulda” that happens on the day after an election. Don’t let Romney get away with it again. And don’t delegate the job of refuting him to your underlings or the media in the week AFTER Romney tries to foist off that kind of nonsense on not just you, but the American public. Instead, act like you ask US to behave: as if every phone call, every small contribution, every door knock and yes, every debate performance might just be “the deciding factor.” Because it might be.
What Ezra said. Romney’s comments were so shocking – and disgusting – on their face, that it’s tempting to simply point to them or mirror the video and assume that the reader/viewer will know without thinking what’s wrong with them. Truthfully, most people probably will intuitively understand most or all of why Romney’s comments were so vile. But merely using implied assumptions to carry the day on a revelation of this magnitude is to do a disservice to the public record. In short, it’s not enough to simply point and roll our collective eyes at Romney’s despicable, divisive comments. It’s important, for the record (and even if it seems obvious), to point out exactly why Romney’s comments are so revealing about his character, his campaign, and his plans for the country.
In yesterday’s Washington Post, Ezra Klein does exactly that (so I don’t have to!). Go read it all, but here’s a taste of Ezra’s devastating takedown of Romney’s remarks and the broader implications of what they mean:
For what it’s worth, this division of “makers” and “takers” isn’t true. Among the Americans who paid no federal income taxes in 2011, 61 percent paid payroll taxes — which means they have jobs and, when you account for both sides of the payroll tax, they paid 15.3 percent of their income in taxes, which is higher than the 13.9 percent that Romney paid. Another 22 percent were elderly.
So 83 percent of those not paying federal income taxes are either working and paying payroll taxes or they’re elderly and Romney is promising to protect their benefits because they’ve earned them. The remainder, by and large, aren’t paying federal income or payroll taxes because they’re unemployed.
Ouch. And spot on. It’s devastating because it simply lays out the facts of who pays what kind of (and how much) taxes in modern America. I especially like Klein’s point that, at 15.3%, even someone who pays only payroll taxes is paying a greater percentage of his or her income than Mitt Romney himself paid in the one year we have complete data for (2011, in which Romney paid 13.9%). Romney’s surreptitiously-recorded statements, made behind closed (and presumably gold-plated) doors to a private audience of top-dollar donors when he thought nobody was listening, are in truth nothing new on the right. Their tone strongly echoes Ronald Reagan’s welfare queens, riding around in the free Cadillacs the government bought them. Such noxious nonsense wasn’t any more true in Reagan’s day than it is today when Romney says similar words.
Klein’s service in this column is reminding us of exactly how and why it’s so false. That’s worth remembering, and especially worth repeating, loudly and often, when it rears its ugly head, as it has this week. So, gratitude to Ezra for remembering this stuff doesn’t do itself. Go read the whole thing; it’s more than worth your time.
Most of us heard this old cliché for the first time when we were children. The rest of us heard it at some point along the line. I’d venture a guess virtually all of us of voting age have heard it by now; it’s long been a bit of Americana. Well-known songs have been written about it:
The point is, the phrase “pants on fire” quite clearly is understood generally to refer to lying, even gross, flagrant lying. So until very recently, I had assumed that PolitiFact’s rating of the same name, “Pants on Fire,” was thusly named to indicate PolitiFact judged any claim they slapped with that label to be not merely inaccurate or false, but of having been uttered knowingly; in short: that the person making the claim was lying.
Boy, was I wrong.
Even if you’ve been watching nothing but Olympics coverage for the past week-plus, if you read this blog, you know that on July 31, Harry Reid gave an interview to the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein and Ryan Grim in which he said that a Bain investor had told him Mitt Romney had paid no taxes for ten years. I’ve already had my say on the advisability of the politics surrounding this claim by Reid, but needless to say, such a prominent Democratic leader saying such an inflammatory thing in the midst of a heated Presidential election caused quite a stir (and continues to do so). More than a week later, the story – if anything – appears to be gaining steam, rather than losing it.
This may, in fact, be exactly what Harry Reid and/or the Obama campaign wanted: for continued focus to remain on the startling fact that Mitt Romney, in sharp contrast to most other modern Presidential candidates, has refused to release more than two years of his tax returns; the two most recent years, when he knew he was running for President. Regardless of the strategy, though, this story has undoubtedly been, behind the Olympics and the recent abominable massacre at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, the biggest story around, for more than a week now.
You know what that means, readers! Yup, like a moth to a flame, it meant it wouldn’t be long until that unique specimen of the new breed of self-appointed, independent fact-checkers-for-the-people, PolitiFact, would be weighing in with their verdict on this issue. Well, the wait is over, folks: PolitiFact has rendered their verdict: Harry Reid’s statement earns the coveted “Pants on Fire!” And it is because of this that I learned I’d been making an incorrect assumption about the nature of the “Pants on Fire” designation.
How, I wondered, could Reid’s statement possibly have qualified for “Pants on Fire” status? Did Harry Reid lie? Well, what was his actual claim? It’s important to remember that Reid did not himself claim – as some of the more pugnacious and less careful right-wing outlets have asserted – that Romney had paid no taxes. Instead, Reid’s claim is that a Bain investor told him so. Now, is it possible that Reid is lying when he says a Bain investor told him that information? Of course it is! To date, Reid has refused to name his source for the information he says he received. Also – let’s face it – politicians, especially in election seasons, have been known to lie. Heck, if they didn’t, there’d hardly be a need for an organization like PolitiFact, would there?
If Harry Reid were willing to disclose the name of the person who he says gave him this information, PolitiFact’s job would be straightforward: call Reid’s source and verify that he or she really did tell Harry Reid that Romney paid no taxes for ten years.
Period. That’s it.
Even in such a case, it’s critical to realize that it would NOT be PolitiFact’s job – at least, not as far as Harry Reid’s claim is concerned – to try to determine whether the Bain investor’s claim about Romney was true, because that’s a separate claim. It’s completely possible for it to be true that a Bain investor told Harry Reid that Romney paid no taxes for ten years and ALSO for it to simultaneously be false that Mitt Romney paid no taxes for ten years, if the Bain investor who was Reid’s source was lying or mistaken. In such a case, even though the Bain investor’s claim would be false (or possibly even a lie), Harry Reid’s claim (that the investor told him this information) would still be 100% true.
In reality, however, since Reid continues to refuse to name his source – and it isn’t hard to think of perfectly legitimate reasons for Reid not to name the source, reporters do this all the time to protect sources – Reid’s claim is unverifiable*. So, why did PolitiFact even weigh in on Reid’s claim, let alone assign it their most-notorious “Pants on Fire” rating? WAS Harry Reid lying? There’s no way to know, I thought! Confused and annoyed, I finally got around to looking up PolitiFact’s “Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter” page, which describes how and why they make the calls the way they do. Although the section that describes the ratings themselves is quite brief, it was there I discovered I’d incorrectly been assuming “Pants on Fire” meant “lying.” PolitiFact’s definition of “False” is essentially what most dictionaries’ is: “The statement is not accurate.” But “Pants on Fire” is defined by PolitiFact as: “The statement is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim.”
In other words, the only difference, for PolitiFact, between a false statement and a “Pants on Fire” statement is that the latter, in addition to being inaccurate, is also “ridiculous.” Not “said with malicious intent to deceive” or “knowingly false” (in other words: a lie), just “ridiculous.”
Now, it’s quite true, as any lawyer will tell you: proving someone is lying can be very difficult, because one must prove intent. You have to prove the person accused of lying KNEW their statement was false at the time they made it, and employed their false statement with intent to deceive. Although this can be difficult, it’s not impossible: in some cases, enough facts exist that it can be done. By contrast, however, proving that something is “ridiculous” is literally impossible, because what is “ridiculous” is a matter of personal interpretation, just like what is “tasty” or “loud” or “annoying” is a matter of personal interpretation.
That’s what’s so startling about PolitiFact’s definition of “Pants on Fire” – it’s not just that PolitiFact uses a different definition than what virtually everyone understands “pants on fire” to mean, it’s that the definition PolitiFact uses relies upon a subjective assessment. Stated more succinctly, PolitiFact’s assessment of “Pants on Fire” requires an opinion.
And that, folks, is why PolitiFact should be shunned for all serious fact-checking. They may continue to make the correct call in certain cases. But just as last year’s “Lie of the Year” fiasco showed, this most-recent foray on the part of PolitiFact from the safe and respectable waters of fact-checker into the much murkier territory of opinion-holder and shaper serves to show that PolitiFact has abandoned the role of neutral umpire: a “Pants on Fire” claim need be not just false, but deemed ridiculous in the opinion of the PolitiFact staff.
It may pain PolitiFact to hear this, and I would certainly agree that PolitiOpinion is both more unwieldy as a phrase and less compelling as a source for facts than “PolitiFact,” but (sadly) the former much more accurately describes what PolitiFact too often does: offer opinions on the political statements of the day. That makes them literally nothing more than glorified bloggers. If anything, it makes PolitiFact less honest and worthwhile than most political bloggers, because partisan bloggers don’t typically make an attempt to cloak themselves in the garb of neutrality as PolitiFact does. I’m not suggesting PolitiFact has particular political leanings, but it’s clear they moved some time ago from simply doing their best to determine the facts of a claim, into the realm of offering their opinion about the claim, as well.
They should stop pretending otherwise.
* I use the phrase “unverifiable” not just because it’s accurate, but because it matches additional specific language on PolitiFact’s Principles of PolitiFact and the Truth-O-Meter page:
In deciding which statements to check, we ask ourselves these questions:
• Is the statement rooted in a fact that is verifiable?
By PolitiFact’s own standards, then, they should never have attempted to fact-check this claim. Because, while it’s quite possible that (as a later portion of the same section states) “a typical person [might] hear or read the statement and wonder: is that true,” it’s also undeniable that Reid’s claim cannot be verified. Which, if PolitiFact were following their own guidelines, should render the claim, however juicy and tempting it might be for PolitiFact’s editors, off-limits.
I don’t mention this last bit merely to be didactic or score further points on PolitiFact. I mention it because I think any organization which was genuinely committed to pure fact-checking would have only three – at most, four – “findings” they could bestow on any claim: true (or accurate), false (or inaccurate) and unverifiable, for claims for which the facts are impossible to determine. The fourth potential finding could be “partly true” or “needs context.” This finding could be used in cases where the claim is technically true, but without additional context might convey an overall impression that is false.
It’s instructive to note that this is essentially the rating system utilized by one of the Internet’s oldest fact-checking outfits, snopes.com. Although Snopes has some political entries, they don’t confine themselves to the political realm (in fact, Snopes was started to debunk Internet urban legends, like the kidney-theft-ring). But since their inception, Snopes has stayed remarkably true to this spare, no-nonsense ratings system. By contrast, PolitiFact has a cumbersome at best system of six different ratings: true, mostly true, half-true, barely true, false and the infamous “Pants on Fire.”
It’s beyond my pay grade (and frankly, my interest level) to try to determine whether PolitiFact’s drift in mission from checking facts to weighing in with their own opinions is a result of their confused, bloated ratings system, or whether the ratings were specifically devised to allow PolitiFact editors to subtly inject their own opinions into the political dialogue under the guise of neutral fact-checking. What’s not subject to debate is how committed to pure fact-checking PolitiFact is. The evidence, both here and in previous cases, speaks for itself on that question.
A blog dedicated to the notion that, when it comes to politics, it's just got to be better to light one small candle than to keep shooting in the dark.
This blog consists of the personal political maunderings of, well, me. The term Post Tenebras Lux is Latin, meaning "after darkness, light." It was originally the motto of the Protestant Reformation*. And although this blog is not in any way based in or concerning either Christianity or religion in general, I shamelessly horked the Calvinists' motto because I love the notion of progress being akin to the collective struggle to awaken from a great darkness...
* Update: Apparently, as of April, 2013, Post Tenebras Lux is now also the title of a reasonably well-received movie).
RT @LibertyBelleJ: If those opposed to abortion call miscast "pro-choice" as "pro-abortion," it's only fair to call "pro-gun" folks "pro-de… • written 3 hours ago
