Truth Index: Romney and Obama--90 Days To Go

As of August 1, 2012, Mitt Romney and Barack Obama had 535 Truth-o-Meter rulings between them, which should make for an interesting measure when compared, since together they make up roughly nine percent of all PolitiFact rulings since its inception.

In May I posted the month-to-month accumulated index for Obama and Romney (he was Politi-Scored in April) and noted that he started out at the end of 2010 with a higher Truth Index than Obama, which is an achievement since Obama’s Truth Index has almost always been relatively high and in positive territory. But following PolitiFact’s rating of statements made in his presidential announcement and then what amounted to quite a few not-so-truthful criticisms of Obama as his campaign went on, he has dropped almost 35 points, from a positive 19 to a negative 16 overall. This chart shows the accumulated average since December, 2010.  It is the basically the chart posted in May extended for four months.

Click to enlarge: Romney's anti-Obama campaign statements are what has brought his Truth Index
down the most.

As noted on the chart, the big drop on Romney’s Truth Index appears to have occurred in June, 2011. And, wouldn’t you know, June 2 was the date Mitt Romney announced he was running for president, at a farm in Stratham, New Hampshire. The big dive for Mitt came in the second quarter of 2011 as shown in this chart, which is the non-accumulated Truth Index; that is, for example, in that second quarter, Romney only had 5 rulings which together measured a horrific negative 110 Truth Index.

Click to enlarge:  Romney bounced back after all his presidential announcement Pants on Fires, but
not to where he was before, when he was "truthier" than Obama.

In reviewing the quarter, we find that Romney started off with a ruling of Pants on Fire on May 13, where he had repeated PolitiFact’s 2010 Lie of the Year, that President Obama’s health care law "represents a government takeover of health care.” Yet in that ruling it was said of Romney, in the equivocal way which PolitiFact often speaks of the Truth Index:

Mitt Romney has a relatively even PolitiFact record, with roughly the same number of True and Mostly True statements (35) as Mostly False, False and Pants on Fire (34)

On June 2, Romney made his presidential announcement speech, where PolitiFact took him to task for saying "we are only inches away from ceasing to be a free market economy" and that Obama “traveled around the globe to apologize for America” which garnered two more Pants on Fire.

This was followed by a statement on June 16 that “this is the slowest job recovery since Hoover” found False by PolitiFact, and the fifth and last statement rated for the second quarter of 2012, found Half True, that "Obamacare takes $500 billion out of Medicare and funds Obamacare” which was probably deemed Half True because of the way in which he said it (unlike one of the candidates running against him).

For what it’s worth (in the interest of certain anti-PolitiFact blogs), I thought it might be entertaining to look at the “Pants on Fire” factor, a relative measurement of Pants on Fire awarded as a percent of False, under the defective assumption that it proves liberal bias on the part of PolitiFact. And yes, it appears that Romney received the rating Pants on Fire about 2.75 times more than Obama did, for all the False and Pants on Fire rulings between them. That compares to the 1.74 as computed for all of PolitiFact National.