PolitiFact agrees to disagree with itself on budget cuts

Bless your heart, PolitiFact.

PolitiFact has lately started to wrap up its "Obameter" feature, rating whether President Obama delivered on the set of campaign promises PolitiFact tracked.

One recent item caught our eye, as Obama earned a "Compromise" rating for partially delivering on a re-election campaign promise to cut $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion in spending.

Veteran PolitiFact fact checker Louis Jacobson wrote this one.

Jacobson and PolitiFact received some great advice from an expert, then proceeded to veer into the weeds:

"Like anything else in budgeting, it's all about the baseline," said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense. "It's a cut relative to what?"

The most obvious way to judge how much spending went down on Obama's watch is to start with how much spending was expected in 2012, when he made the promise, and then compare that to the amount of spending that actually materialized.

Huh? What happened to the incredibly obvious method of measuring how much was spent in 2012 when he made his promise and then looking about how much was spent at the end of his term in office?

Jacobson's Dec. 5, 2016 Obameter story doesn't even acknowledge the method we're pointing out, yet Jacobson appeared well aware of it when he wrote a budget cut fact check way back in 2014:

First, while the ad implies that the law is slicing Medicare benefits, these are not cuts to current services. Rather, as Medicare spending continues to rise over the next 10 years, it will do so at a slower pace would [sic] have occurred without the law. So claims that Obama would "cut" Medicare need more explanation to be fully accurate.

Jacobson faulted a critic of Obama's health care law for using "cuts" to describe slowing the growth of future spending. Yet Jacobson finds that deceptive method "the most obvious way" to determine whether Obama delivered his promised spending cut.

But at least there's a happy ending to the discrepancy. The National Republican Senatorial Committee has "the most obvious method" counted against it (as deceptive), while President Obama receives the benefit when PolitiFact uses the Republicans' deceptive method to rate the president's promise on cutting spending.

There's nothing wrong with favoring the good guys over the bad guys, right?


Inside Baseball Stuff

In terms of fact-checking, we noted a particularly interesting feature of Louis Jacobson's rating of President Obama's promise of cutting spending by $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion: Obama was promising that spending cut over and above one he was already claiming to have achieved. Though PolitiFact's presentation makes this part of Obama's statement obvious, PolitiFact does not bother to confirm the claim.

Consideration of context serves as a fact checker's primary tool for interpreting claims. If Obama saved $1 trillion before making his promise of equal or greater savings in his second term, the means he used to achieve that savings is the means we should expect him to use to fulfill his promise for his second term unless he specifies differently.

We failed to find any mainstream fact check addressing Obama's claim of saving $1 trillion in 2011:

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, I-- I have to tell you, David, if-- if you look at my track record over the last two years, I cut spending by over a trillion dollars in 2011.

If Obama did not save $1 trillion in the first place, he cannot fulfill a promise to cut "another" $1 trillion. At best he can fulfill part of the promise: to cut $1 trillion.

Louis Jacobson and PolitiFact did not notice?

Checking whether Obama saved that $1 trillion in 2011 should have served as a prerequisite for rating Obama's second-term promise to save another $1 trillion or more. Fact checkers could then assume Obama would save the second $1 trillion under the same terms as the first.

Promises, promises

What's more useless than PolitiFact's trademarked "Truth-O-Meter"? How about its device for rating presidential promises, the Obameter?

Years ago, we pointed out an absurd rating when PolitiFact gave President Barack Obama a "Promise Kept" rating for staying in office while the nation achieved on its own what Obama had proposed achieving through a "Renewable Portfolio Standard." Obama promised to change the RPS. PolitiFact gave him credit for keeping the promise before it was kept.

In this new case, we will partly defend the president, albeit without doing him any favors.

This "Obameter" item is focused on the $2,500 promise, as PolitiFact separately failed on the promise to sign a health care bill providing universal coverage.

Obama fulfilled this promise in its literal sense. "Up to $2,500 a year" covers everything equal to or below $2,500 per year. If Obama increased costs to families by $5,000 per year, it fulfills his promise to decrease costs to families by up to $2,500 per year.

Absurdly, Obama could only break this promise by saving a typical family more than $2,500 per year.

Obama's promise was a classic political promise because it didn't really mean anything while at the same time sounding like a wonderful promise. The president implied the typical family would save about $2,500 per year under the legislation he promised. The promise paints operations like PolitiFact into a corner. They can either grade the promise on its implied meaning, which PolitiFact did, or else admit Obama's promise effectively promised nothing.

Obama delivered on the empty literal promise, unquestionably.

PolitiFact deserves partial credit for highlighting Obama's failure to achieve the promise he implied. But a fact-checker can help arm the public against misleading campaign rhetoric by explaining the deception of an "up to" clause.

PolitiFact did not do that.

Sublime Bloviations: "PolitiFlub: 'Effortless promise-keeping by the president'"

Sometimes, PFB editor Bryan White laments, he can't believe his eyes when he reads various PolitiFact stories. Thus begins his latest review of PolitiFact's most recent "Obameter" rating.

PolitiFact's latest gift to our 44th president came in the form of the coveted "Promise Kept" rating regarding Obama's campaign promise to "...establish a 10 percent federal Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) to require that 10 percent of electricity consumed in the U.S. is derived from clean, sustainable energy sources, like solar, wind and geothermal by 2012."

With Cap and Trade legislation bogged down and unlikely to pass, how did the Commander in Chief manage to fulfill his promise to require greater reliance on green energy sources? PolitiFact intern David G. Taylor lays out how the campaign commitment was committed:

We spoke with the [sic] Christina Kielich of the U.S. Department of Energy press office. She told us that the United States receives approximately 11 percent of its electricity from renewable sources. This breaks down to about 6 percent from hydroelectricity, 3 percent from wind, and approximately 1% each from solar, biomass, and geothermal. Thus, in 2011 - one year head [sic] of Obama"s promise, the United States has already reached more than the 10 percent renewable level.

Holy Pulitzer Prize, Batman! Not only is Obama actually exceeding the 10% he campaigned on, he's a full year ahead of schedule!

But faster than you can say "non-partisan", Bryan points out the flaw:

In case it isn't clear what is going on here, Taylor is substituting a new promise for the old promise. The old promise was that the president would require 10 percent of U.S. energy to come from renewable sources. The new promise is that the U.S. will produce at least 10 percent of its energy from renewable sources. The latter promise is a tad like my personal promise that the sun will come up tomorrow. When the sun appears, my promise is kept. Did I do anything to help it along? Not at all.

As bad as it would be to credit the president with keeping a promise which required nothing of him, the real problem stems from the fact that Obama's promise was one of action. He would establish a requirement. Taylor's story provides no evidence of the establishment of any sort of requirement.

In other words, the amount of energy the U.S. is currently producing, or acquiring, from renewable sources is irrelevant to and independent of Obama's promise to create a renewable energy standard.

Long time PolitiFact followers might note that this is hardly the first time they've granted Obama a positive grade for something he never actually did. Back in 2009 they rated a chain email "Half True" for the claim that Obama "closed off shore tax safe havens." In that rating, Obama had simply proposed legislation that would close off shore tax havens. As the rating noted:

Although the legislation enjoys the support of the White House, it is likely to face strong opposition from corporations that do considerable business overseas....In other words, it's premature to put this one in the "Obama Accomplishments" column.

But why let a little technicality like actually being enacted stop you from putting it in the "Obama Accomplishments" column anyway? Besides, it's not like he's a Republican:

Just as we rate Obama"s [sic] promises kept only when they were passed by Congress and signed into law, we will rate Republican promises not just on whether they pass the House, but whether they are ultimately enacted.

Had Taylor simply followed PolitiFact's own guidelines, he would have realized his Promise Kept rating was dubious just by looking up the date Obama's 10% renewable energy source requirement was "passed by Congress" and "ultimately enacted". Instead, we're left with a gross double standard, and another solid example of PolitiFact's war on objectivity.

Bryan has more issues with the rating that I didn't get into here. As always, read the whole article.