Politi-Score: The Six Million Meal Woman

S T R E T C H I N G
the truth more than her face!

 Nancy Pelosi is the subject of this next individual analysis of fact-check to fact-check comparisons with the Politi-Score. In a previous post I stated I was thinking about doing Joe Biden, but he has not had much this year in the way of rulings: Pelosi’s have gone down “a bit” since she lost her position as speaker, but I thought she would serve as a useful female Democratic comparison to Republican Michele Bachmann, who was my initial Politi-Score designee. Pelosi has not had as many rulings as Bachmann so I have to compile her scoring a bit differently: looking at her total rulings up to about a year ago, then comparing them to that year since, as well as to Bachmann.

There’s a total of 22 rulings from all sources: 11 from only PolitiFact up until one year ago (August 2010) and 11 for the period August 2010 to August 2011: from PolitiFact (6), Factcheck.org (4) plus a single one from the Washington Post Fact Checker. Although that single one proved to be a very crucial fact-check in terms of PolitiFact ruling accuracy and/or potential bias.

It turns out Pelosi has been going the way of Bachmann on the Politi-Score, or maybe even the opposite direction, since Bachmann’s PolitiFact (PF) Truth Index has technically improved from a year ago. Pelosi’s “truthiness” has gone down considerably, and her overall average of an almost “Mostly False” negative 41 was a vast drop from a close-to-Half-True negative 4 which was her Truth Index up until about a year ago. This was because in the last year she’s averaged a negative 75 on the PF Truth Index; her Politi-Score for the last year, the combination of all three fact-checkers as a measure, is a negative 77. That’s pretty bad. As my favorite Truth Indexer Steve at Quibbling Potatoes might prove, she’s way out of one standard deviation. In other words, her non-truthfulness is way off the norm.

There were two re-covered fact-checks. The first one was an employment numbers comment that Pelosi’s made frequently in different forms. In April, she said that more jobs were created in the first year of the Obama administration than all eight years of George W. Bush. PolitiFact and Factcheck.org both reviewed this statement. PolitiFact ruled it False while Factcheck.org called it misleading:

Nancy Pelosi accurately — but misleadingly — said more private jobs were created last year than under Bush. Her statement was true. But it's also true that there were still 2,065,000 fewer private jobs in May than there were when Obama took office.

At last year's pace of job creation, it would take until February 2017 just to regain the jobs lost since the high point reached under the previous administration. And it would still take until 2015 to regain all those jobs even under the faster pace of job growth during the last 15 months.

PolitiFact ruled Half True on a statement by Pelosi that “Under a House Republican appropriations bill, "6 million seniors are deprived of meals” concluding as follows:

In other words, Pelosi’s problem wasn’t her math; it was how she reported her math at the event. So ultimately, Pelosi is wrong, but we think she deserves credit for taking a cautious approach in cobbling together her numbers. On balance, we rate he claim Half True.

Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post’s The Fact Checker, wasn’t nearly as magnanimous, giving Pelosi’s statement 4 Pinnochios, or the equivalent of a PolitiFact Pants on Fire:

In a city with overheated rhetoric, Pelosi’s statement ranks high on this year’s list of bloviated bluster. It’s bad enough that she repeatedly mixed up 6 million meals and 6 million people — and made no effort to correct the record after her statement was reported in the media. But the figure she used appears to have been invented itself, with little basis in fact.

So, we have PolitiFact saying she took a “cautious approach in cobbling together her numbers”, while the Washington Post Fact Checker titles Pelosi's figures “absurd math.”

My conservative counterpart made one post in regard to Pelosi’s statement, comparing its similarities to one made by Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee. Priebus made a similar sort of numbers mistake but never clarified it for PolitiFact, while Pelosi did. According to Bryan White:

Under the assumption that the political affiliations of the subjects do not matter, it appears that Priebus could have warranted a "True" rating by communicating to PolitiFact that he misspoke and meant to refer to 2.6 million jobs lost rather than 26 million…

Those of you who note that such a policy permits PolitiFact to present ratings as true despite lacking any proof of the finding--granting themselves an exception to the standard applied to others--have a good point.

Reince Priebus, promptly contact PolitiFact and let them know you meant 2.6 million jobs lost.

Here’s how PolitiFact explained it:

When we contacted Pelosi’s office, they walked us through their calculations. But first, they acknowledged an error in Pelosi’s remark: She should have said "6 million meals for seniors," not meals for "6 million seniors." So right from the beginning, we’ll have to downgrade her original comment’s accuracy.

Now, Glenn Kessler also was in contact with Pelosi’s office; only Kessler, again, wasn’t quite as tolerant of getting “walked through” an “acknowledged error.”

After we pointed out that fact, Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said “she means meals for seniors — 6 million meals.” In 2011, the agency is expected to deliver a little over 200 million meals, so that’s a cut of about three percent.

That’s a pretty big “oops.” She referred to “6 million seniors,” “3 million seniors” and “6 million people.” We understand slips of a tongue, but three times in a row, so emphatically, is hard to fathom.

Further review of the two rulings showed some startling discrepancies. Kessler emphasized the fact that Pelosi was guessing about the size of the cuts themselves in the context of the budget. Jacobson just looked at the total number of meals delivered by the Department of Health and Human Services nutrition programs. Jacobson never discussed the following “other problems” that Kessler iterated:

First, the administration requested the elimination of $6 million in earmarks, so it seems strange for Pelosi to call that a Republican cut. That should not be included, leaving us with $65 million in possible cuts.

Second, in the administration’s 2012 budget request, President Obama identified $150 million in cuts to the agency’s budget. It seems that those already-identified targets would be a more logical place to start looking for trims than meals for senior citizens, most of whom have incomes of less than $20,000.

Finally, the agency’s budget justification notes on page 55 that it has kept spending on senior meals essentially flat from 2010 to 2012, resulting in 36 million fewer meals for senior citizens. That’s six times higher than the figure that Pelosi has decried as an affront to “national values.” The administration’s budget, in fact, has earned the ire of some advocates for hungry seniors. Perhaps 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would be a more appropriate place for Pelosi to direct her outrage.

So, not only did Lou Jacobson miss the boat on this one, but Bryan White did so as well. The Washington Post ruling comparison would have carried greater weight in support of his bias contentions, as opposed to his Reibus comparison.  Or, he could have included both.

It seems PolitiFact, every now and then, cuts more slack than it should for members of either party, as it did in the case of Michele Bachmann’s claim about 16,500 IRS agents in charge of Obamacare. Maybe they’re being nice, or maybe they’re focusing too much on the statement itself and not looking enough at the background of it. I suspect the latter. Chalk one more up to “not reconcilable.”

Also, for those who might be interested, here is how Pelosi and Bachmann compare:

At the end of 2010, Bachmann’s Truth Index was a pants-on-fire -123 (by the end of June she was overall -83). Now with some higher rulings in 2011 averaging -47, she’s brought it up to a still profligate -80. Pelosi, on the other hand, reversed direction. This past year she’s averaged a -77, which brought a close to baseline score of -4 down to an overall average of -41. So while overall Pelosi appears slightly more truthful, she’s been actually about 64% less truthful than Bachmann since the beginning of the year.

I can be as politi-psychotic as Bachmann!