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Truth gets rubbery on the US presidential trail: fact-checkers by Charlotte Raab
Thu Jan 3, 3:27 AM ET
With scam statistics, baseless criticisms, misquotes, and cockeyed memories, the truth gets a battering on the campaign trail in the hands of candidates for the White House.
But imprecision is a venerable US political tradition, according to FactCheck.org, an independent watchdog which aims to "hold politicians accountable" for what they say.
"Presidential candidates kept us busy" over the past year, said Brooks Jackson, director of FactCheck, an arm of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.
The campaign trail produced "a bumper-crop of falsehoods and distortions," which the organization has threshed through for its new list of prize-winning whoppers.
Topping the list with not one but five bogus claims was former New York mayor and Republican contender Rudy Giuliani.
FactCheck demolishes each of them, especially Giuliani's assertion that New York City was suffering "record crime" until he became mayor.
"In fact," says FactCheck's sober analysis, "the city recorded its highest rates of both violent crime and property crime years before he took office. The downward trend was well established before he was sworn in" as mayor, in 1994.
Giuliani's Republican rival, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, maybe topped the field for hyperbole, when he told voters in a television advertisement: "In the next 10 years, we'll see more progress, more change than the world has seen in the last 10 centuries."
The Democrats were no slouches in the hokum department. Senator Hillary Clinton claimed in a TV spot that soldiers in the National Guard and Reserves did not enjoy health insurance until she took up their cause.
But FactCheck researched the issue and demonstrated that most of them did have health care.
"Clinton did help expand and enhance government health care coverage for reservists, but can't claim credit for creating coverage where none existed," it said.
Clinton's main competitor, Senator Barack Obama, has been widely challenged for stating that there are more young black men in prison than in universities in the United States.
In this case, Obama could point to a 2002 study by the Justice Policy Institute for evidence. But more recent data from the US Census Bureau concludes the opposite is true.
Covering up for an exposed half-truth sometimes leads to more prevarication. Romney claimed recently that as a youth he "saw" his father, who was governor of Michigan, walking in a protest with civil rights leader Martin Luther King.
Challenged on it, Romney argued that "saw" didn't necessarily mean with his own eyes.
"I 'saw' him in the figurative sense," Romney explained.
"If you look at the literature or look at the dictionary, the term 'saw' includes being aware of -- in the sense I've described."
The 2008 presidential candidates are no better nor worse tellers of tall tales than their predecessors, Jackson said.
"It is just a function of running for office," he said.
"The incentive is to say things that get votes... Truth is of secondary importance to a candidate."
Famous exaggerations can long outlive elections, such as one from Al Gore, who lost the 2000 race for the White House to George W. Bush and is still remembered for boasting that he invented the Internet.
But some fabrications never seem to hurt politicians, according to Carl Cannon, the National Journal's White House correspondent, who has made a compilation of presidential tall tales after covering campaigns for more than 20 years.
In his time, president John F. Kennedy boasted he could read 1,200 words a minute. President Lyndon Johnson claimed that he had an ancestor who died at the Alamo -- a heroic battle in Johnson's home state of Texas. In fact, Johnson great uncle took part -- but didn't die -- in another battle with Mexico, at San Jacinto.
Cannon, writing in the Atlantic magazine, also recalled that Ronald Reagan boasted to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal that he had filmed the liberation of the Nazi death camps by US soldiers in World War II.
The problem with that story was, Reagan never served in Europe.
Challenged on it, Romney argued that "saw" didn't necessarily mean with his own eyes
I guess it depends on your definition of "is" comes to mind.
Truth gets rubbery on the US presidential trail: fact-checkers by Charlotte Raab
Thu Jan 3, 3:27 AM ET
With scam statistics, baseless criticisms, misquotes, and cockeyed memories, the truth gets a battering on the campaign trail in the hands of candidates for the White House.
But imprecision is a venerable US political tradition, according to FactCheck.org, an independent watchdog which aims to "hold politicians accountable" for what they say.
"Presidential candidates kept us busy" over the past year, said Brooks Jackson, director of FactCheck, an arm of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania.
The campaign trail produced "a bumper-crop of falsehoods and distortions," which the organization has threshed through for its new list of prize-winning whoppers.
Topping the list with not one but five bogus claims was former New York mayor and Republican contender Rudy Giuliani.
FactCheck demolishes each of them, especially Giuliani's assertion that New York City was suffering "record crime" until he became mayor.
"In fact," says FactCheck's sober analysis, "the city recorded its highest rates of both violent crime and property crime years before he took office. The downward trend was well established before he was sworn in" as mayor, in 1994.
Giuliani's Republican rival, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, maybe topped the field for hyperbole, when he told voters in a television advertisement: "In the next 10 years, we'll see more progress, more change than the world has seen in the last 10 centuries."
The Democrats were no slouches in the hokum department. Senator Hillary Clinton claimed in a TV spot that soldiers in the National Guard and Reserves did not enjoy health insurance until she took up their cause.
But FactCheck researched the issue and demonstrated that most of them did have health care.
"Clinton did help expand and enhance government health care coverage for reservists, but can't claim credit for creating coverage where none existed," it said.
Clinton's main competitor, Senator Barack Obama, has been widely challenged for stating that there are more young black men in prison than in universities in the United States.
In this case, Obama could point to a 2002 study by the Justice Policy Institute for evidence. But more recent data from the US Census Bureau concludes the opposite is true.
Covering up for an exposed half-truth sometimes leads to more prevarication. Romney claimed recently that as a youth he "saw" his father, who was governor of Michigan, walking in a protest with civil rights leader Martin Luther King.
Challenged on it, Romney argued that "saw" didn't necessarily mean with his own eyes.
"I 'saw' him in the figurative sense," Romney explained.
"If you look at the literature or look at the dictionary, the term 'saw' includes being aware of -- in the sense I've described."
The 2008 presidential candidates are no better nor worse tellers of tall tales than their predecessors, Jackson said.
"It is just a function of running for office," he said.
"The incentive is to say things that get votes... Truth is of secondary importance to a candidate."
Famous exaggerations can long outlive elections, such as one from Al Gore, who lost the 2000 race for the White House to George W. Bush and is still remembered for boasting that he invented the Internet.
But some fabrications never seem to hurt politicians, according to Carl Cannon, the National Journal's White House correspondent, who has made a compilation of presidential tall tales after covering campaigns for more than 20 years.
In his time, president John F. Kennedy boasted he could read 1,200 words a minute. President Lyndon Johnson claimed that he had an ancestor who died at the Alamo -- a heroic battle in Johnson's home state of Texas. In fact, Johnson great uncle took part -- but didn't die -- in another battle with Mexico, at San Jacinto.
Cannon, writing in the Atlantic magazine, also recalled that Ronald Reagan boasted to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal that he had filmed the liberation of the Nazi death camps by US soldiers in World War II.
The problem with that story was, Reagan never served in Europe.
Challenged on it, Romney argued that "saw" didn't necessarily mean with his own eyes
I guess it depends on your definition of "is" comes to mind.
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