Politi-Scoring the "Newty Professor"

Because Newt Gingrich likes to refer to himself as a “professor” and “historian” I thought it might be interesting to take a look at his claims among the fact-checkers involving history just to see how “accurate” he is.

Newt the Professor often gets the cartoon treatment as part of our pop culture.

Selecting out those PolitiFact statements by Gingrich designated to the topic “History” in order to take a look at how truthful he is as an “historian” was not enough. Some statements didn’t seem “historical” enough in a contemporary context. Gingrich statements reviewed by the other two fact-checkers needed to be evaluated as relating to “history” as well. So I settled on a few caveats in selecting fact-checked statements with a “history” perspective: I left out Gingrich’s biographical history, and recent history, in particular, during the period of time in 1990’s in which he was Speaker of the House. In other words, I left out Gingrich’s personal history, the history he conveys about himself. I left out only one statement of the seven total which PolitiFact designated in the topic “history” for him. Many of the statements chosen were comparative, such as “there are more in the U.S. in poverty than at any time since the U.S. Census Bureau began keeping records” (i.e., in U.S. history—this was given a Half True by PolitiFact) or his only Pants on Fire “The U.S. spends less on defense today as a percent of GDP (than) since Pearl Harbor,” where PolitiFact Georgia writer M.B. Pell concludes thus:

A better way to compare defense spending, or any kind of government spending over a long period of time, is to use dollars adjusted for inflation, Adams said.

The United States spent $700 billion on defense in 2010, $300 billion more than the adjusted Cold War average, Adams said.

Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project, said defense spending also does not include funding for other agencies that contribute to national defense such as the Department of Veterans Affairs and the State Department.

"It’s a distorted way to think of it for the sole purpose to pimp for more money," Wheeler said.

Gingrich tweeted that the country now spends less on defense as a percentage of the GDP than at any time since the start of World War II. That’s a firm statement, but since the Cold War ended, and in a few other years as well, the percent of GDP used for defense has been consistently lower than current spending levels.

Further, experts say the concept is highly misleading.

Gingrich gets our lowest rating on this one. Pants on Fire.

It came down to 12 statements; here's how the PolitiFact app would look in "3D":

Click to enlarge:  No True, Lots of Half True and Mostly False. Compare History Politi-Score to Newt's overall -53.

Next, I'm going to display a portion of the Excel spreadsheet where I work the ratings to derive the above chart, to show the statements selected. Gingrich had only one rated Mostly True (that “[O]n the day of the New Hampshire primary in 1980, the top 13 people of Ronald Reagan’s staff quit.") out of the 12. Eight of the 12 statements were Mostly False or worse.

Gingrich’s Politi-Score of a negative 46 on his “historical” professorial prowess is a bit better than his overall of negative 53, still well in the Mostly False area of truthiness. Of course, my subjective “selection bias” may be in dispute, but I would challenger others to find a more reasonable criteria.

In other words, It appears his students (or he) may be a tad misinformed, and Gingrich is not quite the professor he proclaims himself to be.  In consideration of his divorces and ethics violations, I thought I might call him "a little bit Newty and a little bit Slewty" in remembrance of what some called Anita Hill, the professor who testified against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in the early 1990's.  But I wasn't confident about the connection "slewty" to "slutty" so it wasn't used.  It does seem appropriate, however.

Above is a Washington Post Fact-Checker video on one of Newt's "history" statements about Ronald Reagan: that when he was an actor, he received only one good review (rated false). This was included in the original Gingrich review.