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?

Sidebar: Vampire Vegetarians

Some PolitiFact commenters who are ardent conservatives like to label all Democrats as having an *entitlement mentality.* I do not believe that. I know more successful business owners who are Democrats and even more life long union members who are Conservatives. One would think it should be the other way around.

I love this toon!

As a committed stock market investor since about 1985, one would think I was Republican. Personally, I could be if the party accepted moderates or socially liberal Republicans. Even now being retired, my 401K, IRA and outside investments have (obviously) become much more….conservative. I still get a lot of emails from different investment websites I’ve (somehow) given my email address to, just to see what they have to say. Many so-called investment advisors put their conservative leanings out there, such as this email from Gary Shilling of Forbes. Nevertheless, they still have compelling things to say.

The sentence that jumped out in this letter was “By 2018, 67.3% of the population will be financially dependent on government.” As of 2007, according to Shilling, 58.2% of “Americans…are dependent on the government for major parts of their income.” Shilling offers no solutions to this criticism, however, only to use it to make the claim he can make me money “hand over fist” with his for-fee-only investment advice…well, as a conservative investor, I’m not touching that.