New "Kerryism" falsifies Senator's statement (6/17)

By Brendan Nyhan

As we recently demonstrated, Slate's “Kerryisms" column, which is dedicated to removing "caveats and pointless embellishments" from statements by the Democratic presidential candidate, often distorts or truncates his meaning in the process. However, a new edition published yesterday goes even further, taking an accurate Kerry statement and editing it into a form that is completely false.

Kerry's original statement, from a February 9 broadcast of National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," was the following:

I am the only United States Senator who has been elected four times, currently serving in the Senate, who has voluntarily refused to ever take, in any of my races for the Senate, one dime of political action committee special interest money. The only checks I took were from individual Americans. Now did some individual lobbyists contribute? The answer is, yes, they did.

Will Saletan, the author of "Kerryisms," edited it into the following form (footnotes representing excised text appear in brackets):

I am the only United States Senator[1][2] who has voluntarily refused to ever take in any of my races[3] one dime of[4] special interest money. The only checks I took were from individual Americans.[5]

By removing "political action committee" with footnote 4 and the clarification about accepting donations from individual lobbyists in footnote 5, Saletan makes Kerry's precise claim much less clear. But, more importantly, the removal of the text in footnotes 1-3 actually makes the statement untrue.

Kerry is apparently the only senator to be elected in all four of his races without accepting funds from political action committees (a claim he has made numerous times). But he is not the only senator "who has voluntarily refused to ever take in any of my races one dime of special interest money," as the edited version suggests, even if "special interest money" is read to refer specifically to PAC funds (a clarification Saletan excised).

There are two possible interpretations, both of which render the statement incorrect. First, if "any of my races" refers to any campaign for elected office, it is untrue because Kerry accepted donations from PACs during races for the House of Representatives and Massachusetts lieutenant governor (he also accepted so-called "soft money" donations from corporations to his leadership political action committee in 2001-2002, which were used to promote his presidential campaign). This is why Kerry said "any of my races for the Senate," another detail Saletan removed. And even if "any of my races" refers only to races for the Senate itself, the edited version is still wrong -- Senator Mark Dayton, D-MN, for instance, was elected to his first term in 2000 without accepting any money from PACs, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Kerry's claim turns on the fact that he did it "four times" beginning with his first race. But this caveat is, again, relegated to a footnote.

Boring as it may sometimes be, accurate political claims often require specifics. By actually falsifying a claim from a presidential candidate, "Kerryisms" has gone from bad to worse.

Clarification 6/23/04 3:30 PM EST: This article should have made more clear that Saletan provides Kerry's full quotation below the edited version or on a separate sidebar page. We should have also noted that he changed the instructions for reading a "Kerryism" from the original version, which claimed to translate the candidate's statements into "plain English," to this more limited version.

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Related links:
-Stereotypes run amok: Slate's misleading "Bushisms" and "Kerryisms" (Ben Fritz, 6/15/04)

6/17/2004 10:53:47 AM EST |

Stereotypes run amok: Slate's misleading "Bushisms" and "Kerryisms" (6/15)

By Ben Fritz

Slate's "Bushisms" has highlighted a number of humorous verbal stumbles by the President, while "Kerryisms" has noted plenty of excessively long statements by the Democratic presidential candidate. But both series have a disturbing habit of taking quotes so far out of context as to engage in outright dishonesty. In their search for evidence that fits the assumptions of their respective columns, Slate editor Jacob Weisberg and writer Will Saletan have used quotes that don't really mean what they imply. (Read the whole column.)

Update: A shorter version of this column appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer on June 17.

6/15/2004 12:07:54 AM EST |

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