By Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer and Brendan Nyhan
Published in the Philadelphia Inquirer
A recent Bush-Cheney campaign advertisement continues the administration's attempt to backdate the beginning of the 2001 recession to before the President took office.
Since early this year, Democrats have been charging that, as Sen. John Kerry put it on Jan. 20, "Three million jobs have been lost" during President Bush's term. This catchy sound bite has become one of the rallying cries for Democrats this campaign season. The only problem is that it's not quite true. (Read the whole column.)
On Monday, President Bush put up a new ad in West Virginia attacking Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, for his voting record on defense issues. Wednesday, Associated Press reporter Mike Glover bought the Bush campaign spin hook, line and sinker.
Bush's ad (script, video) suggests that Kerry cast a series of specific votes against body armor for troops and other measures:
NARRATOR: Few votes in Congress are as important as funding our troops at war. Though John Kerry voted in October of 2002 for military action in Iraq, he later voted against funding our soldiers.
SENATE CLERK: Mr. Kerry:
ANNOUNCER: No.
NARRATOR: Body armor for troops in combat.
SENATE CLERK: Mr. Kerry:
ANNOUNCER: No.
NARRATOR: Higher combat pay.
SENATE CLERK: Mr. Kerry:
ANNOUNCER: No.
NARRATOR: And, better health care for reservists and their families.
SENATE CLERK: Mr. Kerry:
ANNOUNCER: No.
However, Bush's own list of supporting "Ad Facts" all cite a single vote Kerry cast in October 2003 against the $87 billion appropriations bill to fund military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. While that bill did include the provisions listed above, it also had many others; a vote against the entire package is not equivalent to casting specific votes against all the items in question. In addition, as Kerry's campaign points out in an online response, the senator supported an alternative amendment that would have funded the bill by repealing Bush's tax cuts for higher income Americans, and he has supported other bills that would provide higher combat pay and increased spending for military health care.
That brings us to Glover's AP story Wednesday, which included this paragraph:
"John Kerry's rhetoric is completely detached from the reality of his voting record," said Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for the Bush-Cheney campaign. Citing the Massachusetts senator's votes against pay increases for military personnel, military housing, body armor, armored Humvees and health care benefits for reservists, Schmidt said, "Almost everything he claimed to support in his speech he has voted against when it counted on the Senate floor.
Glover's framing almost perfectly reproduces the Bush ad's spin, implying that Kerry cast specific votes against all the items in question though the Bush/Cheney campaign has provided no evidence that this is the case. If the AP is going to reprint campaign attacks, it should at least check out the claims before repeating them as fact.
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Related links:
-AP error is latest falsehood about Kerry (Brendan Nyhan, 2/12/04)
-Spinsanity on President Bush
By Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer and Brendan Nyhan
Al Franken and Rich Lowry's reviews of each other's books make some excellent points. However, they also offer some misleading claims and use unfair rhetoric in places. Here, we hope to set the record straight on a few key points (please note that we can't possibly cover everything, nor are there always clear answers to the issues they raise). (Read the whole column.)
Update 3/19 1:58 PM EST: Rich Lowry has posted a second response to Franken on National Review Online that begins as follows:
Spinsanity.com has just posted an exchange between me and Al Franken. I critique Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right; he critiques Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years. This is my response to Franken's piece, which seems deceptively substantive at times, but in which Franken ultimately falls back on his usual mistakes, misunderstandings, selective quotations, and personal cheap shots. I'm going to roll through the Franken piece pretty thoroughly — skipping the plot summary, silly insults, and other fluff — so please excuse the length of this reply, but I want to set the record straight.
By Ben Fritz
Bush administration statements from before the Iraq war continue to be misconstrued by journalists and liberal critics attempting to make it appear that the White House portrayed Iraq as an "imminent" threat.
Interviewing National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on Sunday, Tim Russert, host of NBC's "Meet the Press," said, "Scott McClellan, deputy press secretary, it's 'an imminent threat'" in reference to the administration's case for war against Iraq. This quote was originally misconstrued by the liberal Center for American Progress and, as we wrote at the time, it's a highly deceptive representation of McClellan's statement. The former deputy press secretary was actually talking about the imminent threat Iraq would pose to its neighbor Turkey after an invasion began, thus justifying invoking the NATO charter to help Turkey defend itself; he was not talking about an imminent threat posed by Iraq to the US before war began.
Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) gave a more accurate description of McClellan's statement in a March 5 speech about the case the Bush administration made for going to war in Iraq, but he still failed to put McClellan's comment in the proper context. Arguing that "senior administration officials were suggesting the threat from Iraq was imminent," Kennedy noted amongst other evidence that, "In February 2003, with war only weeks away, then-Deputy Press Secretary Scott McClellan was asked why NATO allies should support Turkey's request for military assistance against Iraq. His clear response was, 'This is about an imminent threat.'"
While Kennedy did a better job than CAP or Russert in saying that McClellan was talking about NATO support for Turkey, he failed to make clear that the White House spokesman was talking about an imminent threat in the event of war with Iraq. Nor did Kennedy make clear why a statement about an imminent threat against Turkey fits into an argument about the Bush administration portraying Iraq as an imminent threat to the US.
Finally, writing in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday, liberal human rights expert and Iraq war supporter Michael Ignatieff stated, "But if lying was not the problem, exaggeration was, and no one who supported the war is happy about how 'a grave and gathering danger' -- as Bush carefully characterized the Hussein regime in his speech at the U.N. in September 2002 -- slowly morphed into an 'imminent' threat." Ignatieff put "imminent" in quotes, but it's not clear what statement he is referring to.
However, as we have previously observed, much of the Bush administration rhetoric in the buildup to the Iraq war argued that Saddam Hussein's regime was not yet an imminent threat - a phrase that has a very specific meaning of an enemy poised to attack - though the White House did describe Iraq as an "urgent" and "grave" threat. Indeed, during his 2003 State of the Union address, Bush specifically stated that the US could not wait until Iraq became an imminent threat. The only time a member of the Bush administration used the word "imminent" in any direct sense actually came in September 2002, when Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "Some have argued that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent-that Saddam is at least 5-7 years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so certain." Also, former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer and communications director Dan Bartlett both answered affirmatively to questions asserting that Bush believed Iraq was an imminent threat. This is hardly evidence that the "imminent" threat argument was at the heart of the Bush White House's case for war.
"Imminent threat" has become the shorthand for Bush's case for war in many people's minds despite the fragmentary evidence. Journalists, politicians and critics need to be more careful when discussing it.
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From the editors:
We are pleased to introduce the first-ever Spinsanity debate between author/humorist Al Franken and National Review editor Rich Lowry, who have critiqued each other's books, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right and Legacy: Paying the Price for the Clinton Years. This is not an endorsement of their work, but a unique opportunity for our site to serve as a nonpartisan forum for a debate between two of America's top political writers. We believe both pieces represent useful contributions to the debate over those books and the issues they discuss.
When Lowry and Franken approached us about publishing their exchange, we agreed provided that the essays were generally serious and substantive. We also reserved the right to respond in order to point out deceptive claims or ad hominem attacks (just as we would for any political writers), and we plan to post our response to a few points that they raise later this week.
We hope frequent readers will enjoy this debate between two writers who appreciate Spinsanity's reputation for non-partisan fairness and that those coming to the site for the first time will stay and explore more of our work.
A Bush-Cheney campaign advertisement released March 3 claims the economy was in recession in January 2001 - the latest in a long pattern of attempts by the administration to backdate the beginning of the recession to before the beginning of Bush's term in office.
The ad, which is titled "Safer, Stronger" (script, video), begins with a graphic stating "January 2001, The Challenge:" followed by "An economy in recession."
However, this claim is not generally accepted in the economic community. The National Bureau of Economic Research's Business Cycle Dating Committee - a standing body of top economists - is widely recognized as the quasi-official authority on the timing of recessions. (A July 2003 Associated Press story, for example, called it "[t]he committee that puts official dates on U.S. economic expansions and contractions"; see also this Explainer column from Slate on NBER's role.) Contrary to the ad's claim, the NBER committee pegged the downturn as beginning in March 2001. After it issued this decision in November 2001, the administration initially endorsed the committee's role: Bush called it "the official announcement ... that our economy has been in recession since March," Council of Economic Advisors chairman Glenn Hubbard said NBER "made its official declaration that the United States was in recession" (152K PDF) and the 2002 Economic Report of the President called NBER "the arbiter of U.S. business cycle dates" (though it disputed the March 2001 date) [3.1 MB PDF].
But in late 2002 and 2003, as Slate's Daniel Gross pointed out, the administration changed its tune after revised data from the Commerce Department showed negative GDP growth in the first three quarters of 2001. The Commerce data were touted by White House spokesman Ari Fleischer on July 31, 2002 - the day they were released - and the claim that the economy was in recession when Bush took office was repeatedly invoked by Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Fleischer in subsequent months. But the definition they relied on -- that two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth represents a recession -- is a crude one not accepted by the NBER committee, which states that it "gives relatively little weight to real GDP because it is only measured quarterly and it is subject to continuing, large revisions." Instead, it looks at monthly data for employment, income, sales volume in manufacturing and trade, and industrial production, among other factors, as it described in its announcement.
Most recently, the 2004 Economic Report of the President claimed that the recession began in the fourth quarter of 2000 (4.9 MB PDF) -- an argument that the NBER committee has not endorsed. It has reviewed the March 2001 finding in light of new data but postponed any decision on moving the start date forward until more data is available.
Of course, the findings of the Business Cycle Dating Committee are not infallible; Bush and his economists are entitled to dispute them, and the NBER body may turn out to be wrong. However, the ad's flat assertion that the economy was in recession in January 2001 is misleading given the lack of consensus among economists. Bush officials have recently been more vague about the precise start date of the recession in recent public comments -- the reality is that the matter has not been sorted out. Their ad, unfortunately, was far more definite than the data justify.
Related links:
-The Bush administration vs. its economists - part 2 (Brendan Nyhan, 5/16/03)