Politi-Score: Twinkle Twinkle Lil Lone Star

Read down for fine print of "Texas Miracle."

Rick Perry is one candidate who has a lot of foretelling qualities that make him the person that Obama might not beat. We’ve had a lot of presidents from the state of Texas; in my time, it suddenly started with a Democrat in Lyndon Baines Johnson when I was awakened to the potential tragedies of politics one cold early afternoon in November of 1963, when I was in grade school. Then there was the first centrist Republican George Bush, who was sort of semi-Texan, and then his "Compassionate Conservative" son for two terms, and now the distinctly right-wing Perry. But Perry also bears a resemblance to Ronald Reagan: a rugged, handsome former Democrat with a certain charisma, who’s going to run during a period of time which is much like the late 70’s-early 80’s, against a candidate who reminds me sometimes of Jimmy Carter. And then there’s something I call the “Rick” factor: Perry is not a business man like these two, but having lived in two states where the guy who recently became governor had the name Rick (Snyder in Michigan and Scott in Florida), my intuition says, maybe there’s another Rick on the horizon, in a much bigger way.

Rick Perry is not the “liar” that I’ve shown Michele Bachmann and Nancy Pelosi to be. He scores more toward the center, although I’d say somewhere below center. Thus far in 2011 he’s had 37 rulings, from PolitiFact (23), Washington Post Fact Checker (8) and FactCheck.org (6). His averages for all three are shown below, along with the Politi-Score (which averages all 37 together):

So Perry has a Politi-Score of -35, as compared to a -47 for Michele Bachmann and a -77 for Nancy Pelosi for similar time periods. As noted in the following PolitiFact Truth Index trend chart for Perry, he was getting better this year, until he started considering a run for the presidency, and then his cumulative Truth Index got worse, although not by a lot, because of the cumulative averaging effects of  his many previous rulings.

In July, Perry ranked Number 17 out of 25 individuals/groups (actually, 26 are ranked; chain e-mails are counted twice for affiliation) with 15 or more rulings ranked by the Truth Index, for all PolitiFact rulings through the end of June. He was Number 9 among 15 Republicans who made it to the list.

Perry’s anti-Obama rhetoric started taking off in August coinciding with his announcement about running. Indeed, between the fact-checkers, there were eight fact-checked claims which centered around something about Obama from about August 15 through September 2, which Politi-scored a -37.50. This might prove to be an interesting new application of Politi-scoring, and that’s how lies about Obama (or any other adversary in PolitiFact's subject term "Candidate Bio") rate, so I might be taking a look at that for other Republican candidates as well.

Perry's most covered statement, for which he's "updated" the percentage (it's now 40%).

Oil You want to know about Texas. And of course, we had three statements where the fact-checkers overlapped, or what I’ve come to term “re-covered” fact-checks. One was “sort of” covered by all three, because the statement’s been repeated and “refined” by Perry. This had to do with his claim that since June, 2009, 40 percent—or 48 percent depending on which time Perry said it—of all jobs in the country were created in Texas. Perry said 48% in June which was ruled Half True by PolitiFact. In August he changed it to 40 percent, which was covered by the Washington Post Fact Checker (getting a blended Two Pinnochios, which equates to Mostly False or Misleading) as well as FactCheck.org (True, but with a bullet list of caveats). Because the arguments used by all three fact-checkers were very similar, with the “base point” from which employment has been counted of June, 2009, I think it’s fair to consider it the same statement. There was another statement in the same vein, but for a different time period, which was that Texas added more jobs in 2010 than any other state, which was rated True by PolitiFact.

I’ve posted before about some of the fact-checkers' qualifications for rating the statement that in August, 40% (or 48% in June, per PolitiFact) of all jobs created in the U.S. since June, 2009, was True but somewhat misleading. Factcheck.org gave a nice bullet list of these qualifications it called….facts!

Fact: Despite the job gains, Texas' unemployment rate has gone up.

Fact: The Texas economy has benefited from high fuel prices.

Fact: Texas didn't experience the big housing bust.

Fact: Texas has benefited from an increase in government jobs, too.

Fact: Texas, along with Mississippi, has the highest percentage of hourly workers at or below the minimum wage.

[Under above minimum wage Fact], Texas has the highest percentage of residents lacking health insurance — 26 percent — among U.S. states.

A real Dis-Tractor. FactCheck.org and PolitiFact both covered a statement by Perry which was a repetition of a “rural” myth or what Snopes might call a “rural” legend (although they did not verify Perry's claim or any other version of it): that due to Federal regulations, those who owned tractors would have to get commercial driving licenses if they just wanted to take the tractor across a road. According to PolitiFact, the reason this myth gets kicked around is that farmers fear that “the advantage they enjoy over commercial haulers” might get taken away; but since such a regulation “hasn't even been proposed at the federal level” PolitiFact’s W. Gardner Selby rated it False.

According to FactCheck.org, Perry literally got immediate fact-check feedback when he made the claim:

As Perry made his claim, a member of the audience twice yelled out, "That's not true." And it is not. In fact, five days before Perry made his claim, the U.S. Department of Transportation issued a press release saying it had "no intention to propose new regulations governing the transport of agricultural products."

Do all the climate change skeptics live in Texas? Perry made a statement in mid-August that more and more scientists are questioning global warming. Consistent with past rulings regarding claims about the IPCC and that there’s a growing consensus that the activity of human beings is contributing to it, PolitiFact ruled Perry False. The Washington Post Fact Checker came down a bit harder giving Perry the Pants on Fire equivalent of Four Pinnochios.

Perry’s statement suggests that, on the climate change issue, the governor is willfully ignoring the facts and making false accusations based on little evidence. He has every right to be a skeptic — all scientific theories should be carefully scrutinized — but that does not give him carte blanche to simply make things up.

As I was putting this together, I noticed PolitiFact added a new ruling for Perry of “Mostly True” with a claim about Obama saying how safe the Tex-Mex border was. So I “stopped the presses” to include it—just to show I’m not that biased. But it didn’t have much effect on Perry’s overall Politi-Score. Perry not only scored at a higher “truth level” than Bachmann and Pelosi, but there were no conflicts between the fact-checkers rating the same statements he's made.

I'm a Texas-sized Politi-Psychotic!