PolitiFact turns incoherent Obama statement into "Half True" claim

 Behold:

Remember President Obama the constitutional scholar?
 
Here, the constitutional scholar makes the ability of 30 percent of the U.S. population to control a majority of Senate seats conditional on filibuster reform.

It's a completely preposterous argument, yet somehow PolitiFact arranges the tea leaves so they spell out "Half True."

As for what Obama got wrong, PolitiFact admits it only obliquely (bold emphasis added):

In the transcript of the interview with Klein, this passage about the filibuster included a link to a Washington Post analysis of the differences between population and representation in the Senate. However, the Post article doesn’t precisely support what Obama said. 

...

While the article’s conclusion is generally consistent with Obama’s point, it doesn’t have anything to do with the filibuster or the 60-vote threshold to end one. Rather, the article looked at representation throughout the entire chamber.

PolitiFact tries to make it "Obama's point" that Senate can magnify the power of small populations. But that wasn't really Obama's point. Obama was arguing for filibuster reform.

There is no filibuster reform that changes that basic feature of the Senate. Obama's argument doesn't even count as coherent.

PolitiFact makes a great show of explicating Obama's claim that "30 percent of the population potentially controls the majority of Senate seats." But that's true regardless of the filibuster. We could keep 1,000 people in each of 49 states and have everybody else move to Alaska. That would give a tiny percentage of the U.S. population a supermajority of Senate seats.

So what? There's no argument for filibuster reform in there.

One might use the above scenario to argue for changing the Constitution itself to make it more democratic. But we would hope that somebody would remember that the undemocratic features in the U.S. Constitution were put there deliberately, specifically because the framers considered democracy in the form of popular rule an exceptionally bad form of government. That's why they set up a republic with a federalist system dividing up political power in a variety of ways.

Watch PolitiFact argue Obama's point was something other than filibuster reform (bold emphasis added):

(W)e crunched the numbers from the 2020 Census and concluded that Obama’s overall point had merit but that he misstated the details.

In particular, Obama said that states with a small percentage of the population could control "the majority of Senate seats." Given today’s partisan tendencies in each state, controlling an actual majority of seats would not be feasible for that small a percentage. However, a small percentage of the population could control enough seats to successfully wield the filibuster, which effectively gives them control over whether a majority can pass legislation.

As illustrated above, a small percentage of the population could potentially wield a supermajority in the Senate. It has nothing to do with the filibuster, and the need for filibuster reform was Obama's point.

Check out PolitiFact's summary version of Obama's point:

Obama said, "The filibuster, if it does not get reformed, still means that maybe 30% of the population potentially controls the majority of Senate seats."

In the Senate’s current makeup, senators representing 29% to 39% of the U.S. population would be sufficient to mount a filibuster and block a vote on legislation, in a sense controlling what can be passed in the chamber.

In the first paragraph PolitiFact relates what Obama actually said. In the second paragraph PolitiFact translates what he said into something completely different. "Majority of Senate seats" turns magically into the number of seats needed to successfully filibuster.

Obama's argument was elaborate window-dressing for the real and truthful argument for filibuster reform: "If we change the filibuster we can pass more of the legislation we want to pass." That statement could earn a "True" from PolitiFact, eh?

It was completely ridiculous for Obama to try to suggest filibuster reform would affect the constitutional ability of small-population states to potentially control a majority of Senate seats. The one is independent of the other. That leaves Obama's true point, the supposed need for filibuster reform, without any coherent support.

It was nice of PolitiFact to overlook that fact in rating Obama's spurious argument "Half True."

It's flatly false that the filibuster, reformed or not, allows a minority population to control a majority of Senate seats. That's a feature of the Constitution, not the filibuster.

A constitutional scholar ought to know that.


Correction June 8, 2021: Removed a redundant "the" from "and the the need for filibuster reform." Hat tip to the the Eye Creatures.

Remember Back When PolitiFact was Fair & Balanced?

PolitiFact has leaned left from the outset (2007).

It's not uncommon to see people lament PolitiFact's left-leaning bias along with the claim that once upon a time PolitiFact did an even-handed job on its fact-checking.

But we've never believed the fairy tale that PolitiFact started out well. It's always been notably biased to the left. And we just stumbled across a PolitiFact fact check from 2008 that does a marvelous job illustrating the point.

It's a well-known fact that nearly half of U.S. citizens pay no net income tax, right?

Yet note how the fact checker, in this case PolitiFact's founding editor Bill Adair, frames President Obama's claim:

In a speech on March 20, 2008, Obama took a different approach and emphasized the personal cost of the war.

"When Iraq is costing each household about $100 a month, you're paying a price for this war," he said in the speech in Charleston, W.Va.

Hold on there, PolitiFact.

How can the cost of the war, divided up per family, rightly get categorized as a "personal cost" when about half of the families aren't paying any net federal income tax?

If the fact check was serious about the personal cost, then it would look at the differences in tax burdens. Families paying a high amount of federal income tax would pay far more than the the price of their cable bill. And families paying either a small amount of income tax or no net income tax would pay much less then the cost of their cable service for the Iraq War (usually $0).

PolitiFact stuffs the information it should have used to pan Obama's claim into paragraph No. 8, where it is effectively quarantined with parentheses (parentheses in the original):

(Of course, Obama's simplified analysis does not reflect the variations in income tax levels. And you don't have to write a check for the war each month. The war costs are included in government spending that is paid for by taxes.)

President Obama's statement was literally false and highly misleading as a means of expressing the personal cost of the war.

But PolitiFact couldn't or wouldn't see it and rated Mr. Obama's claim "True."

Not that much has changed, really.


Afters (for fun)

The author of that laughable fact check is the same Bill Adair later elevated to the Knight Chair for Duke University's journalism program.

We imagine Adair earned his academic throne in recognition of his years of neutral and unbiased  fact-checking even knowing President Obama was watching him from behind his desk.

PolitiFact gives the 8 in 10 lie a "Half True."

We can trust PolitiFact to lean left.

Sometimes we bait PolitiFact into giving us examples of its left-leaning tendencies. On November 1, 2017, we noticed a false tweet from President Barack Obama. So we drew PolitiFact's attention to it via the #PolitiFactThis hashtag.

Subsidies for the vast majority of people? 8 in 10 can find plans for $75/month or less? #PolitiFactThis

— Bryan W. White (@ZebraFactCheck) November 1, 2017

We didn't need to have PolitiFact look into it to know that what Obama said was false. He presented a circular argument, in effect, using the statistics for people who had chosen an ACA exchange plan to mislead the wider public about their chances of receiving subsidized and inexpensive health insurance.

PolitiFact identified the deceit in its fact check, but used biased supposition to soften it (bold emphasis added):

"It only takes a few minutes and the vast majority of people qualify for financial assistance," Obama says. "Eight in 10 people this year can find plans for $75 a month or less."

Can 8 in 10 people get health coverage for $75 a month or less? It depends on who those 10 people are.

The statistic only refers to people currently enrolled in HealthCare.gov.

The video ad appeals to people who are uninsured or who might save money by shopping for health insurance on the government exchange. PolitiFact's wording fudges the truth. It might have accurately said "The statistic is correct for people currently enrolled in HealthCare.gov. but not for the population targeted by the ad."

In the ad, the statistic refers to the ad's target population, not merely to those currently enrolled in HealthCare.gov.

And PolitiFact makes thin and misleading excuses for Obama's deception:

(I)n the absence of statistics on HealthCare.gov visitors, the 8-in-10 figure is the only data point available to those wondering about their eligibility for low-cost plans within the marketplace. What’s more, the website also helps enroll people who might not have otherwise known they were eligible for other government programs.

The nonpartisan fact-checker implies that the lack of data helps excuse using data in a misleading way. We reject that type of excuse-making. If Obama does not provide his audience the context allowing it to understand the data point without being misled, then he deserves full blame for the resulting deception.

PolitiFact might as well be saying "Yes, he misled people, but for a noble purpose!"

PolitiFact, in fact, provided other data points in its preceding paragraph that helped contextualize Obama's misleading data point.

We think PolitiFact's excuse-making influences the reasoning it uses when deciding its subjective "Truth-O-Meter" ratings.

HALF TRUE – The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context.
MOSTLY FALSE – The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression.
FALSE – The statement is not accurate.

In objective terms, what keeps Obama's statement from deserving a "Mostly False" or "False" rating?
His statement was literally false when taken in context, and his underlying message was likewise false.

About 10 to 12 million are enrolled in HealthCare.Gov ("Obamacare") plans. About 80 percent of those receive the subsidies Obama lauds. About 6 million persons buying insurance outside the exchange fail to qualify for subsidies, according to PolitiFact. Millions among the uninsured likewise fail to qualify for subsidies.

Surely a fact-checker can develop a data point out of numbers like those.

But this is what happens when non-partisan fact checkers lean left.


Correction Nov. 6, 2017: Removed "About 6 million uninsured do not qualify for Medicaid or subsidies" as it was superseded by reporting later in the post).

Fact-checking the president

When accused of focusing its fact checks on conservatives more than liberals, PolitiFact has been known to defend itself by pointing out that it has fact checked Barack Obama more than any other political figure.

We properly ridiculed that claim because it is natural for a national political fact checker to place special importance on the statements of a president. We should only be surprised if the fact checker fails to fact check the president most frequently. And now that President Donald Trump has succeeded President Obama in office, we can do some comparisons that help illustrate the point.

Please note that this comparison does have an apples-to-oranges aspect to it. PolitiFact started out with the aim of fact-checking the election campaign. Therefore, we should allow for PolitiFact to get a slow start on President Obama's first term.

We based the comparisons on the number of fact checks PolitiFact performed on the presidents between their inauguration (two of those for Obama) and Oct. 18. In fact, PolitiFact fact checked Obama more frequently in 2009 than it did when he launched his second term in 2013.

As the graph shows, through Oct. 18 PolitiFact has fact checked Trump more in 2017 than it did Obama in 2009 and 2013 combined.

Trump has an excellent shot at supplanting Obama as the figure most fact checked by PolitiFact within just four years of taking office.

And perhaps we'll never again hear PolitiFact's balance defended on the basis of its fact-checking Obama more often than other political figures.

Ted Cruz fully to blame for giving Obama too much blame?

Does PolitiFact show a left-leaning bias in the blame game?

We thought PolitiFact went a bit easy on President Obama in a State of the Union speech some time ago. Obama said businesses had created so many jobs. PolitiFact said Obama's claim was "Half True" but then later elevated the rating to "Mostly True" because the president did not take as much credit as PolitiFact had first believed.

No, of course there was no concrete explanation for why PolitiFact changed its opinion.

PolitiFact played the blame game again on March 16, 2016, this time with Ted Cruz.

Here's how it looked:

PolitiFact said Cruz said President Obama has been presiding over U.S. jobs going overseas. PolitiFact reasons that Cruz gives Obama too much blame and so rates Cruz's claim "Mostly False."

Whatever plausibility PolitiFact's rating carries from its headline and deck material ought to fade pretty quickly once readers stumble over what Cruz actually said (bold emphasis added):

[Meet the Press host] Chuck Todd played a clip of Obama saying the Republicans are significantly to blame for the angry tone of politics today.

Cruz responded, "You know, Chuck, Barack Obama's a world-class demagogue. That language there is designed to divide us. No, Mr. President, we're not angry at that. We're angry at politicians in Washington, including you, who ignore the men and women who elected you, who have been presiding over our jobs going overseas for seven years."

The part of Cruz’s comment that caught our eye was that Obama has "been presiding over our jobs going overseas for seven years." We decided to take a look. (Cruz’s staff did not respond to inquiries.)

To factually conclude that too much blame was placed, the fact checker needs a blame baseline. Knowing whether Cruz blamed the president too much requires the fact checker to reasonably gauge how much blame Cruz placed on the president.

We think Cruz made that very difficult for PolitiFact with the wording he used, for Cruz did not single out the president. Cruz first mentions anger at "politicians in Washington" and after that makes clear Obama is included in the group ("including you").

So how much blame is Cruz placing on Obama, based on what Cruz said? How is the blame divided up between "politicians in Washington" and President Obama?

We don't see any way for PolitiFact to make that determination without simply making an assumption. Cruz offered no guidance. There's nothing in the context that helps. At least in the earlier case featuring President Obama we have the context of the State of the Union address. Presidents use that address to implicitly play up the benefits of their policies.

PolitiFact apparently assumes Cruz is blaming the president particularly for some unspecified role in allowing jobs to go overseas. Cruz doesn't even specify how much blame falls on Washington politicians, let alone the president. It isn't even necessary to assume that the anger at Obama and other Washington politicians is justified anger.

Is this fact-checking? It's hard to see how it qualifies.

PolitiFact has no trouble at all, despite the ambiguous nature of Cruz's claim, finding that Cruz placed too much blame on Obama. And PolitiFact likewise has an easy time assigning blame to Cruz for wrongly assigning blame, ergo the "Mostly False" rating.

PolitiFact considered no Cruz blame on "Washington politicians" other than President Obama.

In a way, it's easy to understand why PolitiFact left the other Washington politicians out of its consideration. Keeping them in consideration makes the fact check even more difficult than doing one that places an unspecified degree of blame on Obama. Pretending Cruz did not spread the blame around makes it easier for PolitiFact to maintain the fiction that Cruz placed too much blame on Obama.

We hasten to point out that such an approach hardly qualifies as unbiased.

The awe-inspiring importance of place

On May 22, 2015, PolitiFact Wisconsin published a fact check of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. It seems the NRSC accused Democratic candidate for Wisconsin senator, Russ Feingold, of announcing his candidacy in California.

Whoa, said PolitiFact Wisconsin. That's "Pants on Fire" false!

We admit the ruling amused us. After all, PolitiFact is the non-partisan fact checker that gave then-candidate Barack Obama a "Mostly True" for the claim his uncle helped liberate Auschwitz.

No, we're not kidding.

Auschwitz was liberated by the Soviet Union, not by Allied forces. PolitiFact gave Obama the "Mostly True" rating since he did have an "uncle" (in a loose-but-legitimate sense of the term) who was with the Allied forces that liberated a concentration sub-camp called Ohrdruf.

The NRSC was ineligible for that kind of break despite saying Feingold was a Stanford (California) professor and a failed 2010 candidate:

"In what may be the oddest move of the campaign season thus far, Stanford Professor and failed 2010 candidate Russ Feingold announced his Wisconsin Senate run today from … California."

Funny how that works.

PolitiFact in Obama's pocket

Behold as President Obama works PolitiFact like a marionette (bold emphasis added):

Hosting members of the 2013 WNBA champion Minnesota Lynx in the White House’s East Room, Obama told the crowd that the last time the team came to the White House -- in 2012, after the Lynx’s first championship season -- he predicted that they would be back before he left office.

"I just want to mention that I was right," Obama joked. "You can fact check that, PolitiFact."

PolitiFact received its orders and acted.  It fact checked Obama's statement, at least after a fashion.

PolitiFact produced a little self-promoting story.  It didn't do a full-fledged fact check of the president, though the results show Obama successfully manipulated the fact checkers.

Obama wouldn't invite a fact check of himself if there was any chance he was wrong, is there?

That seems like PolitiFact's core assumption.  Read on (bold emphasis added):

We checked and, well -- we’ll give credit where credit’s due.

On Sept. 18, 2012, the Lynx visited the White House and Obama said this:

"They’ve picked up right where they left off –- on top of the Western Conference by a wide margin. Coach (Cheryl Reeve) just told me that they’ve now secured home-court advantage throughout the playoffs. With three games to go, best record in the league. They’re leading the league in points, rebounds, assists. So you get the idea -- they’re pretty good. And I have a feeling that we might end up seeing them back here before too long."

PolitiFact was right that Obama said he predicted the Lynx would be back before he left office (bold emphasis added):

Now, in 2012, when the Lynx came here after their first title, I said I had a feeling I might see them again before I left office.  (Laughter.)  I just want to mention that I was right.  And so you can fact-check that, PolitiFact.  I got that one right.

In 2012, Obama didn't say anything about the Lynx returning before he left office.  His statement was far more vague.  He said he had a feeling the team would return to the White House "before too long."  Given the context, with Obama lauding the team's accomplishments during the 2012 WNBA season, Obama most likely meant that the Lynx would win the WNBA championship that year.  The Lynx lost that year, as PolitiFact noted, to the Indiana Fever.

Obama used one of the time-honored techniques of fortune-telling charlatans:  Keep your predictions vague.

PolitiFact bought it (bold emphasis added).

As it happened, the Lynx fell to the Indiana Fever in the 2012 finals (and the Fever received a White House invite). But the Lynx won a second title in 2013, ultimately affirming Obama’s prediction.

So, this is a win-win. Obama gets to glow in his factual accuracy, and we get to confirm that he knows our name.

What an embarrassment.  Was Obama joking?  Probably.  We'd give him the benefit of the doubt.  Regardless of whether he was joking, PolitiFact's response is an embarrassment.