Play Mittsy for Me: Politi-Scoring Romney

Keep it under wraps, Mitt.

When I first became interested in politics as a teenager, I was particularly enamored with what was then called the Rockefeller Republicans. As I lived in the Midwest (Ohio) I was intrigued with Mitt Romney’s dad, George, who seemed to me to be one of those Republicans with a liberal streak, and at the time he was running for president, I thought he was just the guy America needed: socially liberal and fiscally conservative. But that was just me, and as it turned out, he didn't make it.

Mitt was probably a lot like his father at one time; but since then he has been too much of all things to all people. Right now I am looking for him to veer back left in his winding road to trying to win the presidency, and I believe his right turn may (partly) account for some of his down turn in truthiness as I will show in this Politi-Score review (although I discovered something more specific, but related to that right turn). In the mean time he needs to work on his “Tin Man” image, and there are certainly some good ways to do that.

In my last post I was looking forward to scoring 184 Mitt Romney statements but in cross-checking everything found I had missed one, so make that 185 Romney statements, a pretty big number considering the other reviews I’ve done. There were 125 by PolitiFact, 33 from FactCheck.Org, 24 from the Washington Post Fact-Checker, and an extra 3 I threw in from AZ (Arizona) Fact Check. PolitiFact may have an even higher count now; my cut off for their rulings was as of April 10.

For comparison purposes, Rick Santorum had 45 rulings (although his were only from PolitiFact); Newt Gingrich, my last full Politi-Score before Romney, had 76; Rick Perry was 37, Herman Cain 34, and Michele Bachmann was my first with 50 fact-checks and rulings. So all in all, Mitt has had more rulings and fact-checks than all the other presidential candidates I’ve done combined, excluding Gingrich. That being said, there will be another post comparing the Truth Indexes/Politi-Scores for all Republican candidates.

For FactCheck.Org, it is much more difficult to gather as well as decide the “score” on claims. They do not have any nice neat lists like PolitiFact and the Washington Post Fact-Checker. I must go through a name search and then evaluate each article and subjectively decide where it goes as far as a Truth-o-Meter ruling. For most purposes there is no “Pants on Fire.” For FactCheck.Org I decided to go as far back as early 2011. And I must evaluate the rulings from WaPo as well; the page that shows accumulated rulings for each politician also includes statements made by their superPACs on their behalf which I did not include. So including inevitable new rulings since this post, my numbers are slightly different than what you may see at the respective fact-check websites.

Overall. Here’s how the “current” Politi-Score looked overall for Romney: he’s at a negative 18.6, a relatively good score compared to the other presidential candidates, but with a lot of caveats.

Click to enlarge:  Romney's Politi-Score on 185 fact-checks

Fact-Checker comparison. It might help to take a look at the score he received from each fact-checking source. To make it more apples to apples with the other fact-checkers, I separated Romney’s pre-2011 PolitiFact rulings from those since early 2011, as the other fact-checking scores were also mostly for this current period. I did not include a Politi-Score for AZ-FactCheck for the three rulings they did as that does not mean much. For the record, they had one True, one False, and one they called “Unsupported” which I counted as “Half True.” This puts AZ-FactCheck’s Politi-Score right at zero for the three rulings.

Click to enlarge: Romney's combined PolitiFact Truth Index for 125  rulings is -12.9, almost the same as Washington Post's.

FactCheck.Org was the hardest on Romney with a Politi-Score of negative 45.6, even if someone might say it was “moi” for alleged bias in assigning scores, I must say I worked very hard to give Romney the benefit of a doubt, or as my conservative counterpart might say, to be as charitable as possible. The words “Romney was wrong” generally led to a False, any cautions as to the False, or caveats, would make it a Mostly False, while “right in one respect/wrong in another” would glean a Half True, or a “misleading” or “exaggerated” claim. “Romney was “right” or “correct” would be a True or Mostly True depending on the context. (Basically I strived to go by PolitiFact’s guidelines.) If in comparing the rulings to PolitiFact or WaPo FactChecker where they had done the same fact-check and I found they had a different ruling than mine (occasionally this would occur, I was usually off one Truth-o-Meter notch) I would re-visit it.

I’ve posted before that FactCheck.Org generally tends to find more than the usual number of fact-checks as false (almost as if they are not interested in True statements, a sort of selection bias, although it’s bi-partisan), so their scores tend more negative using the Truth Index, which more heavily weights false claims in its formula.

I should also note I was having technical problems with the Washington Post Fact Checker which I can’t go into here, so I could not delve into them as thoroughly as I wanted. The majority of the Pinnochios given Romney were one (Mostly True) and two (Half True) although he had only one “Gepetto checkmark” (True) which Glenn Kessler (admits he) rarely assigns.

PolitiFact Truth Index Trends. Like Rick Santorum, the campaign has done a bit of damage to Mitt’s Truth Index. He was more truthful according to Truth Index measurements in his 2008 campaign, and he took a path downhill very steadily to the present. Here I start with what his Index was prior to 2011, and went forward quarterly because of the number of rulings--until as his campaign gained steam he started getting more statement scrutiny from PolitiFact (please note this is PolitiFact only since I had dates to go by), to the point that starting in 2012 it was enough to do it monthly:

Next up, a look at what appears to have brought Romney’s Politi-Score down….considerably.

Postscript:  The total for number of rulings from PolitiFact was incorrectly reported as 124 in one of the charts.  The chart was calculated on 125 and I neglected to change the label.