Lil White Lies: Keep Talking

Recently my conservative counterpart argued a PolitiFact ruling using an equation, and such an equation approach might help with his latest argument against a PolitiFact Pants on Fire ruling for Mitt Romney:

X is televised making statement S.

X is actually quoting Y, but statement S as televised removes the attribution to Y (giving the impression that Statement S only applies to X).

PolitiFact rates statement S for not including the attribution to Y, and downgrades it because of this false impression.

The statement comes from a 60-second political ad recently aired by Mitt Romney:

The ad contrasts a 2008 campaign speech by Obama with text on the screen that criticizes Obama’s economic record, including, "Greatest Jobs Crisis Since Great Depression," "Record Home Foreclosures" and "Record National Debt."  The ad then has a clip of Obama saying,"If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose."

This is the full context of Obama’s statement: (Romney ad portion highlighted)

Even as we face the most serious economic crisis of our time, even as you are worried about keeping your jobs or paying your bills or staying in your homes, my opponent's campaign announced earlier this month that they want to ‘turn the page’ on the discussion about our economy so they can spend the final weeks of this election attacking me instead," Obama said in the speech. "Sen. McCain's campaign actually said, and I quote, "If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose."

Romney’s campaign had this explanation for the “misquote”:

We used that quote intentionally to show that President Obama is doing exactly what he criticized McCain of doing four years ago. Obama doesn’t want to talk about the economy because of his failed record.

Another representative of the Romney campaign stated Obama was “desperate” to avoid talking about the economy.

Bryan White’s argument is that Romney, for the sake of “cost and efficiency” only needed to include one portion of a remark made by Obama during his 2008 campaign. He argues that even if you included the rest of his statement, the context, that it would still be true. That is, “It doesn't change with the context added.” He even goes as far as to end his critique with the statement that “the Romney campaign was justified in omitting” the context.

Therefore PolitiFact “botched” the statement by ignoring the context and because “PolitiFact is incorrect that omitting the context sends a profoundly different message.”

Looking at the context, what was Obama (Romney) saying? I see it as two things, and you can see it’s more discernible if you think of the opponent changing from McCain in 2008 to Obama in 2012 (the opponent of Romney): (1) His opponent (Obama) would rather attack him (Romney) then Obama (2) addressing the economy.

The question then becomes: Has Obama been attacking Romney, and is he avoiding addressing the economy?

If you Google “Obama attacks Romney” the only results you get are about the subject Romney attack ad, plus one where Romney made another distortion about Obama saying something about “lazy Americans.” The Obama camp has been pretty quiet except for its public acknowledgement that it believes Mitt Romney will be the nominee.

As far as Obama not wanting “to talk about the economy”, well, there’s this quote from a paper called “The Fresno Bee”—

Still, that might be inside the bounds of contemporary smash-mouth politics if the Romney campaign's rationale for it were true, but it's not: Although he's suggested that the U.S. economy has been battered by factors he inherited and outside his control, Obama has addressed the U.S. economic situation almost daily since proposing in September a $447 billion plan aimed at sparking job creation. He talked about the economy on his visit to New Hampshire again on Tuesday, acknowledging that "many Americans have spent months looking for work, and others are doing the best they can to get by."

FactCheck.Org had a little different take on Romney’s ad, while confirming it was taken out of context, it would not say it was ridiculously false, but instead provided more perspective so that, as it said, “we’ll leave that for our readers to decide.”

… It is possible that a viewer might be misled into thinking that Obama said this about his own campaign in 2011, since the quote comes 23 seconds after a graphic cites Obama’s comments as being uttered in 2008. But we’ll leave that for our readers to determine.

Though a TV viewer would not know it, the Romney campaign put the full quote in the press release that it sent to campaign reporters, along with an explanation….

Very few viewers will recall that Obama’s words were mocking McCain, however. So was this just a failed attempt at irony rather than an attempt to fool viewers? Again, we’ll leave that for our readers to decide.

Naturally, it appears Romney (and Bryan White) view this as a successful attempt at irony. As we add the unseen context, we see the meaning behind Obama’s statement with more clarity. In reverse, as we remove the context, his statement can only be interpreted on its face. Without any context, it would appear Obama is talking about his own campaign. So to say it is just as true with more context when the context isn’t there, is desultory and somewhat disingenuous.

Lou Jacobson (who else???) could have added a better explanation as to what the “profoundly different message” was that resulted from leaving out the context. He could have reminded readers that the entire speech Obama gave in Londonderry, New Hampshire, from where the paragraph and quote was lifted by Romney, was an upbeat one. That optimism offset negative connotations of how Romney was trying to portray Obama. He could have also noted as FactCheck.Org did that for the uninformed viewer, Obama’s “keep talking” statement appeared 23 seconds after the 2008 time-stamp, meaning it could well have been interpreted as having been said in 2011.

So besides the fact that it was taken out of context, it’s not true in the respect that Obama IS talking about the economy.

When I mentioned the “economy” aspect in a Facebook comment to Bryan, he immediately responded that it was a “red herring” because in 2008, McCain was talking about the economy too. But this was the subject of the Romney campaign immediately printing the full quote along with an explanation of why they took Obama out of context. This was the subject of Obama’s remark, this was the subject of Romney’s counter to the Obama Camp’s complaints of the remark taken out of context.

Of course if you had run the ad as Bryan suggested as an “illustration” it would have been more truthful than the quote as shown, because it showed the full context. So to say it made the same point is disingenuous. The Democrats called it a “low blow” because Obama was saying what someone else said in the campaign that was running against him, it wasn’t his own words.

And if it’s as “justified” as Bryan says it is, why the ‘all’s fair” pronouncements from Team Romney?

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is defending a TV ad that quotes President Barack Obama out of context, signaling he's ready for bare-knuckled campaigning despite sharp complaints from Democrats and some neutral observers.

Bryan White also pointed to someone who beat him to the punch on his interpretation, which was John (not Jim) Nolte at the Breitbart (read: extreme right-wing) “Big Journalism” website. Now, if he could find someone who was neutral making this observation, one might consider his view. But it just shows just how paranoid and one-sided his interpretation is, that it can only be conceived by far right conservatives.

In the “fallacy” talk that Bryan White often employs, this may be called a generalization: it’s okay to over-state your charitable contributions on your tax return because everybody does it…but it doesn’t hold up in an audit. In the same way, being taken out of context in a major way (because, as Bryan fails to point out, using the whole quote brings out the truth of the “keep talking” statement) isn’t okay just because it doesn’t change the context (according to Bryan).  Nice try, though.