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Joe Biden accepted his party's nomination to be vice president at the Democratic National Convention in Denver and used his acceptance speech to attack Republican John McCain's economic policies.
"John thinks that during the Bush years we've made great progress economically. I think it's been abysmal," Biden said in his speech on Aug. 27, 2008.
McCain proposes tax breaks for "the largest companies in the nation, but no — none — no relief for 100-million American families. That's not change; that's more of the same," Biden said.
Here, we're checking Biden's claim that McCain's plan provides "no relief for 100-million American families."
We checked with the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan group that has extensively analyzed the tax proposals of both presidential candidates.
Both McCain and Obama propose extending the Bush tax cuts to some extent. McCain wants the tax cuts extended for all income levels, while Obama wants the tax cuts extended for only those making less than about $250,000.
Besides those extensions, McCain also proposes increasing the exemption for dependents like children. Obama, on the other hand, offers a tax credit of about $500 per person for people who work. Because more people work than claim dependents, Obama's plan tends to impact more people.
The question here is how many people get no reduction in taxes under McCain's proposals. Using the current tax policies as a baseline, McCain's proposals would mean about 44 percent of tax units would not get a tax reduction in 2009, and about 46 percent would get no tax reduction in 2012, according to the center's analysis. A "tax unit" is a technical term for a typical tax return. A single person is one tax unit, and a married couple filing jointly counts as one unit.
There are about 150-million tax units filing annually. So between 66-million and 69-million tax units will receive no tax reduction under the McCain plan, according to the center.
But Biden said 100-million American
families
. We're guessing that Biden may have inflated a claim made in
an earlier Obama ad
that said "100-million
Americans
will get no tax relief at all."
Biden would have made a better case if he had said 100-million people get no tax reduction, because a tax unit can represent more than one person. But in many cases, one family will equal one tax unit. The analysis we use shows between 66-million and 69-million tax units will not see a reduction under the McCain plan. Because the numbers fall short of Biden's statement of 100-million families, we rule it only Half True.
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Update: The Obama campaign provided new information after we first published this item. We've included the additional material, but it doesn't change our ruling.
In making his case for the presidency at the Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama cited statistics to argue that Americans have lost economic ground during the Bush administration.
"We measure progress by how many people can find a job that pays the mortgage, whether you can put away a little extra money at the end of each month so that you can someday watch your child receive her diploma," Obama said in Denver on Aug. 28, 2008. "We measure progress in the 23-million new jobs that were created when Bill Clinton was president, when the average American family saw its income go up $7,500 instead of down $2,000 like it has under George Bush."
We looked up the income numbers to see what happened to incomes during the Clinton years. We found Obama is correct that incomes went up under Clinton but dropped under Bush. But the numbers he uses aren't right.
We looked to the U.S. Census report
Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2007.
Numbers in the report are adjusted for inflation and reflect 2007 dollar values. The report indicates that median household income during the Bush administration dropped from $50,557 in 2000 to $50,233 in 2007, a decline of $324. Under Bill Clinton, median household income rose from $44,359 in 1992 to $50,557 in 2000, an increase of $6,198.
The Obama campaign uses different numbers to calculate income. They look at households in which the age of the householder is under age 65. The campaign believes this more accurately reflects earnings power for workers, because seniors have Social Security income that automatically rises with inflation.
During the course of our research, we found a commentary written by one of Obama's economic advisers that cited the numbers Obama used, with the caveat that it applied to "working-age households." That would leave out seniors, and could conceivably change the numbers we found in the census. (The article didn't include a citation.) Obama didn't use the "working-age" caveat in his speech.
Using those numbers, inflation-adjusted income goes from $51,039 in 1992 to $58,555 in 2000 to $56,545 in 2007. That comes to a drop of $2,010 during the Bush administration and an increase of $7,516 during the Clinton administration. (Note if you want to do your own calculations at home: Pull them from Census reports from the respective years, then use the more technical CPI-U-RS inflation calculator found
here
.)
Having said all that, Obama didn't mention working-age families as part of his speech.
Obama is right with the overall point he's making. Incomes did rise under Clinton and decline under Bush. But the numbers he uses don't include seniors, who today represent about 12 percent of the population. So we rate his statement only Half True.
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In his acceptance speech to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn., presidential nominee John McCain made the case for the presidency, describing his policy positions and contrasting himself to Democratic nominee Barack Obama.
He also discussed his life story as a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, and his family's long history of military service.
"When I was 5 years old, a car pulled up in front of our house," McCain said. "A Navy officer rolled down the window, and shouted at my father that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. I rarely saw my father again for four years. My grandfather came home from that same war exhausted from the burdens he had borne, and died the next day. In Vietnam, where I formed the closest friendships of my life, some of those friends never came home with me. I hate war. It is terrible beyond imagination."
McCain writes extensively about the grandfather — they share the same name, John Sidney McCain — in his memoir
Faith of My Fathers
.
The senior McCain served in the Navy in the Pacific theater during World War II, most notably as commander of the Second Fast Carrier Force and Task Force 38. He was present at the formal signing of the Japanese surrender on the
USS Missouri
on Sept. 2, 1945.
In his memoir, Sen. McCain recounted that his grandfather was eager to get home after the war ended and didn't want to stay for the ceremony:
" 'I don't give a damn about seeing the surrender,' my grandfather told (Admiral William) Halsey. 'I want to get the hell out of here.' To which Halsey replied, 'Maybe you do, but you're not going. You were commanding this task force when the war ended, and I'm making sure history gets it straight.' In his memoir, Halsey described my grandfather 'cursing and sputtering' as he returned to his flagship."
The senior McCain returned home soon afterward to his wife in California. The day after his return, his wife hosted a small homecoming party for him.
"In the middle of the celebration my grandfather turned to my grandmother, announced that he felt ill, and then collapsed," McCain wrote. "He was sixty one years old. He had fought his war and died. His Navy physician attributed his fatal heart attack to 'complete fatigue resulting from the strain of the last months of combat.' "
His obituary ran on the front page of the
New York Times
, and includes the detail that he had returned home only the day before.
"Admiral McCain's groups were called the world's most powerful task force and the destruction they wrought on Japanese military installations and armament centers played a vital role in reducing the country's ability to fight and bringing about final victory," according to the obituary.
We find McCain's statement that his grandfather died the day after returning from World War II to be True.
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In a Feb. 26, 2008, debate in Cleveland, Sen. Hillary Clinton attacked Sen. Barack Obama's record on opposing the war in Iraq, saying that once the invasion ended, he didn't oppose the policy as strongly as he did in 2002.
"By 2004, he was saying that he basically agreed with the way George Bush was conducting the war," she said.
The 2004 remark comes from an interview Obama gave the
Chicago Tribune
on the eve of the 2004 Democratic convention to nominate John Kerry for president. The invasion had long since ended. Troops there were attempting to stop insurgent attacks and prevent kidnappings in the face of concerns from the American public that the situation in Iraq was starting to deteriorate.
"On Iraq, on paper, there's not as much difference, I think, between the Bush administration and a Kerry administration as there would have been a year ago," Obama said. "There's not much of a difference between my position and George Bush's position at this stage."
"How do you stabilize a country that is made up of three different religious and in some cases ethnic groups with a minimal loss of life and minimum burden to the taxpayers?" Obama said later in the interview.
Taking the interview in its entirety, it's clear Obama was speaking about the need to bring a satisfactory conclusion to the Iraq invasion once it had commenced, not diminishing his initial opposition to the war.
In the debate with Clinton, he made the same point a little more succinctly: "Once we had driven the bus into the ditch, there were only so many ways we could get out."
Clinton's statement wrongly gives the impression that Obama was endorsing the Bush administration's overall policy in Iraq. We find her statement to be Half True.
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At the vice presidential debate in St. Louis, Sarah Palin defended John McCain's health care plan and criticized Barack Obama's.
Obama has a plan "to mandate health care coverage and have a universal government-run program," Palin said. "And unless you're pleased with the way the federal government has been running anything lately, I don't think that it's going to be real pleasing for Americans to consider health care being taken over by the feds."
Problem is, Obama's plan keeps the free-market health care system intact, particularly employer-based insurance. It is not a goverment-run program and is very different from the health care systems run by the government in some European countries.
Obama's plan essentially takes the health care system as it is today and seeks to expand it to the uninsured. The plan increases eligibility for the poor and children to enroll in initiatives like Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. It also creates pools for individuals to buy their own cheaper insurance. And it outlines several strategies aimed at reining in costs for everyone, such as streamlining medical record-keeping and emphasizing preventive care.
Obama's plan does not mandate coverage, except for children. Obama said often during the Democratic primary campaign that he did not include a mandate for adults so as not to penalize people with modest incomes.
His reasoning for not including a mandate for adults was this: If premiums don’t drop enough after his reforms are implemented, people will still be unable to afford insurance. If a law mandates they buy it anyway, they probably won’t. Obama’s argument is that if you then fine them, you’re essentially punishing the poor — and they will still be uninsured. Obama said he hopes his plan will lower costs enough that many of the estimated 47-million uninsured will sign up without a mandate, and a mandate will come later.
Obama has said he would like it to be universal, in that everyone has health care coverage.
So Palin is mostly wrong about Obama's plan having a mandate; it only has one for children. He would like it to be universal at some point. She also emphasized that Obama proposes government-run health care, a statement that is completely inaccurate. Taking all that together, we rate her statement Barely True.
Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.
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Trying to challenge Sen. Barack Obama’s preparedness to be president, Gov. Sarah Palin used Sen. Joe Biden’s own words against him.
As Biden and Palin debated records on Iraq during the St. Louis debate, Palin noted, “You also said that Barack Obama was not ready to be commander in chief.”
Indeed Biden did. In an Aug. 19, 2007, debate among Democratic hopefuls, moderator George Stephanopoulos pressed Biden whether he stood by a recent quote that Obama was “not ready” to be president.
Biden said he stood by it.
It’s worth noting that in May 2008, Biden changed his tune. “He’s learned a hell of a lot,” Biden said.
Still, he said what he said. Based on those first comments, Palin’s assessment is True.
In the vice presidential debate in St. Louis, Republican Gov. Sarah Palin tried to take a hammer to Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama’s postpartisan campaign tack.
“Now, Barack Obama, of course, he’s pretty much only voted along his party lines. In fact, 96 percent of his votes have been solely along party line,” Palin said, questioning whether he could reduce polarization in Washington.
In fact, Obama — who joined the Senate in 2005 — has voted with his party 96 percent of the time, according to a study by
Congressional Quarterly
. CQ’s calculation of party unity measures how often members vote with their party on bills where the parties split. By comparison, rival Sen. John McCain has voted with his fellow Republicans at an 81 percent clip over the entire Bush presidency.
But as PolitiFact has reported
before
, voting studies can be skewed depending on a lot of factors, such as attendance, the roll-call votes picked and the issues that arise during the course of the year. Some congressional sessions may have more head-to-head party line votes than others.
Examining votes that matched the position of President Bush — the titular head of the GOP — shows McCain has supported him 90 percent of the time, while Obama has gone along 40 percent, CQ found.
But the question here is if it's true that Obama voted along party lines 96 percent of the time, and that claim is True.
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In two recent appearances on MSNBC's
Morning Joe
, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee boasted about frying squirrels in a popcorn popper.
"When I was in college, we used to take a popcorn popper – because that was the only thing they would let us use in the dorms – and we would fry squirrel," he said on Jan. 18, 2008.
When he appeared on the show three weeks later, on Feb. 6, co-host Mika Brzezinski asked him if he would come back and demonstrate his cooking techniques.
"I'm really ready to do that," Huckabee said. "Because I think the country needs to be able to somehow get into those kind of culinary delights that they've been missing for a long time."
Forgive us, but we were skeptical.
We wondered if the former governor was truly an aficionado of cooked rodents, or if he was just making a play for the all-important squirrel-eating Republican voting bloc.
So we tracked down Huckabee's roommate from Ouachita Baptist University, Rick Caldwell, to ask if the governor really had eaten squirrel.
"I was there," Caldwell said, quickly adding that "I was not a co-conspirator to the actual frying of the squirrel. But I admit to partaking."
Indeed, they had a popcorn popper in their room in the Daniel North dormitory in 1973 and Huckabee was quite the enterprising chef, said Caldwell, a longtime friend who is now an adviser to his presidential campaign.
Huckabee devised a way to make faux doughnuts by punching holes in the middle of biscuits and then frying them in the popcorn popper. Once they were cooked, Huckabee and Caldwell would roll them in sugar. Caldwell says it was as good as a Krispy Kreme.
The squirrel fry was a one-time thing, Caldwell said. A student living down the hall admired the popcorn popper and suggested it would be good for frying a squirrel. Caldwell was out of the room when they cooked it, but he got to sample the meat when he returned.
"It tasted like chicken," Caldwell said.
No one on the PolitiFact staff had sampled a squirrel, so we turned to "Bayou Bill" Scifres, a retired outdoors writer from the
Indianapolis Star
who runs
All Outdoors,
a Web site that offers advice on cooking wild game.
Bayou Bill loves a qood squirrel.
"There are so many ways to cook 'em!" he told us. "With hot biscuits and gravy and fried squirrel and corn on the cob – it's like dying and going to heaven!"
He said cooking them is easy:
"Fry them to a beautiful golden brown on all sides and then turn the heat down; cover the skillet and put in water or maybe good cooking wine. You just let them steam in that for 15 minutes or half an hour," he said
We found recipes on other Web sites that also looked promising:
squirrel cacciatore,
squirrel croquettes
and
squirrels in cream sauce.
Yum!
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The Clinton campaign has raised doubts about Sen. Barack Obama's record on abortion rights because he voted "present" rather than "no" on seven antiabortion bills when he was in the Illinois state Senate.
The day before the Super Tuesday primaries, an e-mail from the head of the Connecticut National Organization for Women took issue with those votes, prompting a response from U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, an Obama supporter, who said the effort by NOW was divisive.
"The facts are clear – in the Illinois state Senate, choice advocates asked strong prochoice legislators like Senator Obama to vote 'present' on Republican-designed bills like a ban on partial-birth abortion to protect a woman's right to chose," DeLauro wrote. "Senator Obama has always had a 100 percent prochoice rating."
We're addressing the votes with
this item
and
this article,
so here we'll focus on Obama's record.
Indeed, DeLauro is correct. Obama has 100 percent congressional voting ratings from NARAL Prochoice America for his three years in the U.S. Senate. The Planned Parenthood Action Fund similarly gave Obama a perfect score on its 2006 congressional scorecard.
He also earned 100 percent records for his votes in eight years as a state senator, according to Pam Sutherland, president and CEO of the Illinois Planned Parenthood Council. (She is neutral in the presidential race and her group has not endorsed a candidate.)
"He has always voted in favor of abortion rights," she said.
So we find DeLauro's statement to be True.
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In a
Face the Nation
interview on Feb. 3, 2008, host Bob Schieffer asked Sen. John McCain if he could win the general election if conservatives decide to sit it out.
"Oh, I would doubt that," McCain responded. "But I am confident we are already seeing many of the conservatives, and in the state of Florida, we carried Florida in a Republican-only primary. We got a very large percentage of the, quote, conservative vote."
Exit poll results from Florida show McCain is on shaky ground here.
Among self-described "conservative" Republican voters, 29 percent voted for McCain, according to a CNN exit poll. That's hardly a huge number. In fact, it's less than the 37 percent of conservatives who voted for Mitt Romney.
"He didn't even get a plurality," said Stuart Rothenberg, who edits the independent Rothenberg Political Report in Washington, D.C. "I don't consider that a large percentage. They (conservatives) haven't warmed to him entirely."
What's more, the more conservative the voter, the less likely the vote for McCain. Among Republicans who described themselves as "somewhat conservative," 35 percent voted for McCain, better than Romney's 32 percent. But among "very conservative" voters, McCain won just 21 percent. Romney more than doubled his tally with 44 percent, and Mike Huckabee nearly tied McCain in this category with 20 percent.
We might be inclined to give McCain more leeway on his claim to a "very large percentage" of conservative voters in Florida if it had significantly improved from earlier primaries. But it hasn't.
Among self-described conservative voters in the New Hampshire Republican primary, McCain got 30 percent of the vote; compared to 38 percent for Romney. About the same as in Florida.
In South Carolina, where 69 percent of those who participated in the Republican primary consider themselves "conservative," McCain got 26 percent of the vote, compared to 35 percent for Huckabee and 16 percent for Romney.
"I don't see him gaining," Rothenberg said. "He still hasn't demonstrated that he can coalesce the conservative vote."
Now, at the end of the day, Rothenberg said, if McCain is running against Sen. Hillary Clinton or Sen. Barack Obama, the conservative voters likely will back him.
But as for McCain's characterization that conservative support in Florida was "very large," it's too relative a concept to call it False. But when it's less than half, less than your opponent and when it hasn't even gone up, we can say it's Barely True.
Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.
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In the Democratic debate in Los Angeles on Jan. 31, 2008, Sen. Hillary Clinton criticized the Bush administration for failing to give American soldiers in Iraq the resources they require. She leveled this accusation:
"We had to fight to get body armor. You know, George Bush sent people to war without body armor."
The issue of body armor — who gets it and whether it's the right kind — has been a source of intense scrutiny nearly from the start of the war in Iraq.
A March 7, 2005, story in the
New York Times
by reporter Michael Moss detailed a deadly miscalculation by the military near the start of the war in April 2003. Army Gen. Richard A. Cody decided to stop buying bulletproof vests after a determination that some 50,000 soldiers not on the front lines could do without them. In the following weeks, Moss wrote, "Iraqi snipers and suicide bombers stepped up deadly attacks, often directed at those very soldiers behind the front lines." Cody quickly ordered bulletproof vests for every soldier. But it took 167 days to start getting those vests to soldiers due to production and paperwork delays. Some soldiers waited months more.
Many soldiers heading to Iraq bought their own body armor despite assurances from the military that it would be provided.
In April 2005, the Government Accountability Office reported on shortages of critical force protection items, including individual body armor. The problems were caused, the report concluded, due to materials shortages, production limitations and distribution problems.
But by and large, everyone eventually got body armor.
In ensuing years, the issue became whether the military was using the right kind.
In January 2006, the
New York Times
cited a secret Pentagon study that found that as many as 80 percent of the Marines killed in Iraq from wounds to the upper body could have survived if they had body armor that reached a soldier's shoulders, sides and torso.
In March 2007, Clinton and fellow Democratic Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia sent a letter to the Comptroller of the United States, calling on him to initiate a GAO investigation to reassess the body armor systems used by the military.
The following month, the GAO issued a report, which concluded that "Army and Marine Corps body armor is currently meeting theater ballistic requirements and the required amount needed for personnel in theater, including the amounts needed for the surge of troops in Iraq."
Nevertheless, with emerging technology and debate over the best type of body armor, the GAO is reassessing body armor, said Roger Charles, vice chairman of the nonpartisan Soldiers for the Truth Foundation, which has been at the forefront of the body armor debate.
Clinton's comment about troops heading into war without body armor, while it wasn't true for all, was true for some soldiers at the beginning of the war. So we rate Clinton's comment Mostly True.
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Senator Barack Obama may be well known for his verbal acumen, but it also turns out the Illinois Democrat is pretty good at math.
At a debate in Austin Thursday night, the Democratic frontrunner reiterated a statement he has used numerous times on the campaign trail: "We send a billion dollars to foreign countries every day because of our addiction to foreign oil."
To get that figure requires some simple multiplication: barrels of oil imports per day times the cost of barrel of oil equals how much U.S. spends daily purchasing oil abroad. So we dusted off our multiplication tables and checked Obama's math.
According to the Energy Information Administration, the U.S. imported 10,102,000 barrels per day of oil during the week ending Feb. 15. The average world price for a barrel of oil that same week was $89.91. That means energy firms spent $908 million on foreign oil daily in mid-February.
Obama's campaign said they used $100 for the price of a barrel of oil, a record reached Feb. 19 on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
That number has since dropped a bit – to $98.86 as of Friday afternoon. Redoing the math, what we spend abroad comes awfully close to the billion-dollar figure Obama quotes. It's 998.2 million.
We'll allow him to round up. Obama gets a gold star in math, and we find his statement True.
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At the Democratic debate in Austin, Texas on Feb. 21, 2008, Sen. Barack Obama responded to criticism that he was little more than a good speaker by saying that he had broad support from voters and newspapers.
He said he has received many endorsements, "including every major newspaper here in the state of Texas."
He's right. We checked and found he has been endorsed in the primary race against Sen. Hillary Clinton by the seven largest newspapers in Texas. Here are samples of what they said:
Houston Chronicle:
"Obama vows to reach out to independents and Republicans with a message of inclusion and cooperation. He offers a historic opportunity to elevate national political dialogue to a higher ground. Those who insist on vitriol and obstructionism would be marginalized."
Dallas Morning News:
"Americans are tired of divisive, hard-edged politics. Democrats would inspire a refreshingly new approach by choosing Mr. Obama as their 2008 candidate."
Austin American-Statesman:
"His optimism, unifying vision and ability to inspire are the kind of healing balm the country needs at this moment in history."
San Antonio Express-News:
"America needs a president that tries to create unity out of diversity, marshalling all the forces — red, blue or purple — that make this country great.
Sen. Barack Obama is the Democratic candidate that offers the best chance to reach that lofty objective."
Fort Worth Star-Telegram:
"Obama might be shorter on detail, but he is by far longer on inspirational spirit, charisma and an ability to energize previously unengaged Americans in the voting process, particularly the usually unengaged up-and-coming generations on whose shoulders America's future rests."
Corpus Christi Caller-Times:
"The Editorial Board endorses Sen. Barack Obama because it believes that he offers the kind of inspirational leadership the country is hungry for."
El Paso Times:
"A weary America, tired of the status quo, fed up with business as usual, is longing for a positive change — and Barack Obama is that change."
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The advocacy group Citizens United Political Victory Fund launched an ad that at first appears to be an attack on Sen. Hillary Clinton, making several charges about votes and political positions.
"One candidate voted against the Bush tax cuts, both times," the narrator states, among other charges.
A photo of Clinton slides over to reveal Sen. John McCain; the narrator says, "Hillary Clinton? No. John McCain."
"John McCain. Surprisingly liberal," the ad concludes.
The ad is correct that McCain voted against tax cuts proposed by the Bush administration two times, in 2001 and 2003. McCain was on the losing end of those votes; the tax cuts passed. In 2006, McCain changed position and voted in favor of extending the tax cuts. McCain has explained his position by saying that although he opposed the cuts when first proposed because of budget issues, rescinding the tax cuts after they were in effect would be the equivalent of a tax increase.
The ad gets it right that McCain voted against the tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. But by using the word "both," it implies there were only two votes. It doesn't mention the 2006 vote when McCain changed position and voted in favor of a tax cut extension. (Clinton voted in favor of the 2006 tax cuts as well.)
We have to deduct a little bit for leaving the impression that there were only two votes on the tax cuts, but the ad is correct that McCain voted against the measures. So we find the statement that McCain voted against the Bush tax cuts "both times" to be Mostly True.
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With polls showing he has a solid lead in most Super Tuesday states, Sen. John McCain took aim at Sen. Hillary Clinton while campaigning in Fairfield, Conn., on Feb. 3, 2008.
McCain boasted that he never sought special projects for his state, while Clinton had sought too many.
"In her short time in the United States Senate, the senator from New York, Senator Clinton, got $500-million worth of pork barrel projects. My friends, that kind of thing is going to stop," McCain said.
We have previously found exceptions in McCain's claims about his own pork (we gave him a False in
this item),
but he's right that Clinton brought lots of federal money to New York. It's just that he dramatically understates how much pork she got.
After she was elected in 2000, Clinton spent her first term focusing heavily on parochial issues. Often joining forces with the senior senator from New York, fellow Democrat Charles Schumer, Clinton issued a blizzard of news releases touting federal money such as $250,000 for "artspace" projects in Buffalo, $200,000 for the Mid-Hudson Children's Museum, $200,00 for the YWCA of Niagara and $69,036 for the golden nematode project at Cornell University (yeah, we had to look it up: the golden nematode is a pest that harms potatoes).
The McCain campaign says it got the $500-million figure from two news stories — a
Los Angeles Times,
report from December 2007 that said "since taking office in 2001, Clinton has delivered $500-million worth of earmarks that have specifically benefited 59 corporations," and a report in
The Hill
, a Washington, D.C., political newspaper that said Clinton obtained at least $530-million in federal money from the first three of the 13 appropriations bills approved in 2007.
But those reflect just a portion of Clinton's prolific pork production.
Taxpayers for Common Sense, a group that tracks congressional spending, has identified about $2.2-billion in Clinton projects in her seven years in the Senate. The group won't publish its final database for several weeks, but Keith Ashdown, an investigator for the group, said a preliminary analysis showed Clinton has brought home far more in federal money than the other senators in the presidential race, McCain and Barack Obama.
Ashdown likened Clinton to Al D'Amato, the famous pothole politician who represented New York from 1981 to 1999. "She has used the power of the purse to take care of a lot of areas of New York," Ashdown said.
So McCain is right that Clinton has brought truckloads of bacon to her New York constituents. McCain just dramatically understates the amount. (McCain's campaign said he was simply being "conservative" with his claim.)
For our ruling, we find that while McCain's numbers are low, he's actually more correct than he realizes because she's brought so much pork to New York. We rate his attack Mostly True.
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Mitt Romney touts his business and executive experience as evidence he would deftly steer the economy as president. At the same time, he blasts rival John McCain as lacking when it comes to the economy.
"He has a number of things that are great strengths of his, but he happened to say the economy was not his strong suit," Romney said at a campaign stop in Denver. "Well, at a time like this in a country like this, I think it is important to have a president for whom the economy is his strong suit."
Did Sen. McCain say that? He denied it at a Republican debate in Boca Raton, Fla., when journalist Tim Russert questioned him about it.
Tim Russert: "Senator McCain, you have said repeatedly, 'I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated.' Is it a problem for your campaign that the economy is now the most important issue, one that, by your own acknowledgement, you're not well versed on?"
McCain: "Actually, I don't know where you got that quote from. I'm very well versed in economics."
It seems that Romney and Russert are both right on this point, while McCain is contradicting his previous statements.
McCain gave an interview to the
Wall Street Journal
in 2005 in which he said, "I'm going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated."
He told the
Boston Globe
in December 2007, ""The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should."
Russert followed up a few days later in a one-on-one interview with McCain. McCain acknowledged the quotes and gave the following response:
McCain: "Okay. Let me tell you what I was trying to say and what I meant in that soundpiece. I spent 22 years in the military. I spent 20 years in the Senate Armed Services Committee. I've been involved in national security issues all my life. I attended the National War College. Of course I know more about national security than any other issue. That's been my entire life. Am I smart on economics? Yes. I was chairman of the Commerce Committee. That's why people like Phil Gramm, Tom Coburn and Warren Rudman and Carly Fiorina and the real strong economic minds, Jack Kemp, the real strong minds on the economy and conservatives on the economy are supporting me. Of course, I always have things to learn, and I continue to learn every day. But I'm very strong on the economy, and, frankly, my economic record is a lot stronger than that of the governor of Massachusetts when you look at his record as governor."
McCain's explanation doesn't change the fact that he did say that economics was not his strong suit. In this instance, Romney is accurately quoting McCain's past remarks, so we find Romney's statement True.
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Republicans have often questioned Sen. John McCain's conservative stripes, and the idea that he was a potential running mate for Democrat John Kerry in 2004 stokes their suspicions even more.
The advocacy group Citizens United Political Victory Fund is currently on the attack, launching an ad that at first appears to be aimed at Hillary Clinton.
"One candidate voted against the Bush tax cuts, both times. ... And was even mentioned as a running mate with John Kerry."
A photo of Clinton slides over to reveal McCain; the narrator says, "Hillary Clinton? No. John McCain."
We checked the claim on McCain's votes
here.
As for the charge that McCain was mentioned as a running mate with Democratic nominee John Kerry in 2004? That's true.
There are many, many references in the media to the idea that McCain was possible for the No. 2 spot on the Democratic ticket. Here are just a few:
• In March 2004, reports about the offer prompted
Good Morning America
host Charles Gibson to ask McCain about it in an interview on the show. McCain answered: "John Kerry is a very close friend of mine. We've been friends for years. Obviously, I would entertain it. But there's, I see no scenario, no scenario, no scenario where I, I foresee no scenario where that would happen."
• After Kerry picked John Edwards as his running mate in July 2004, the
Washington Post
reported that Kerry initiated phone calls to McCain about a possible crossover ticket, "but McCain made clear he was not interested."
• A February 2007 article in
Vanity Fair
magazine titled "Prisoner of Conscience" says: "Kerry felt close enough to McCain at the time to make multiple and serious inquiries about McCain's interest in running for vice president on a national-unity ticket (and McCain basked in the courtship, even if he knew nothing could ever come of it).
• And, in an April 2007 interview with the Web site myDD.com (Direct Democracy for People-Powered Politics), Kerry says McCain's people approached him about being on the Democratic ticket. Responding to suggestions that McCain had approached prominent Democrats about switching parties, Kerry says: "It doesn't surprise me completely because his people similarly approached me to engage in a discussion about his potentially being on the ticket as vice president. So his people were active — let's put it that way."
We're not saying McCain gave the idea much thought or even that he was offered the job, but it's clear he "was mentioned as a running mate with John Kerry." We rule this statement True.
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Barack Obama made his most direct case for the Democratic nomination at a speech on Jan. 30, 2008, in Denver. He criticized fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton, arguing that he represents a more dramatic distinction with John McCain, the apparent Republican front-runner after winning Florida's primary.
In making his argument, Obama attacked Clinton for voting with Republicans on national security issues, among other things.
Among Obama's points: "It's time for new leadership that understands that the way to win a debate with John McCain is not by nominating someone who ... agrees with him in embracing the Bush-Cheney policy of not talking to leaders we don't like."
On this point, Obama seems to be drawing on a difference that arose between him and Clinton in a July 2007 debate hosted by CNN and YouTube.
A YouTube questioner asked if the candidates would be "willing to meet separately, without precondition, during the first year of your administration, in Washington or anywhere else, with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, in order to bridge the gap that divides our countries."
Obama said he would; Clinton said she wouldn't.
Clinton explained her reasoning: "I will promise a very vigorous diplomatic effort because I think it is not that you promise a meeting at that high a level before you know what the intentions are. I don't want to be used for propaganda purposes. I don't want to make a situation even worse. But I certainly agree that we need to get back to diplomacy, which has been turned into a bad word by this administration."
John McCain's public comments seem to reflect an openness to diplomacy while also putting restrictions on face-to-face meetings.
"The most overrated aspect of our dialogue about international relations is direct face-to-face talks," he said in December 2007. "BlackBerrys work. Emissaries work. There's many thousands of ways to communicate. The question is, are you going to have direct talks, and does that enhance the prestige of the president of Iran?"
It's not unreasonable to say that Clinton and McCain share a skepticism about having the president conduct face-to-face diplomatic meetings directly. But Obama strays badly in taking that shared view and equating it with what he calls "the Bush-Cheney policy of not talking to leaders we don't like." Clinton, who was asked about it directly, clearly says she would approach diplomacy differently than the Bush administration has. We find Obama's claim Barely True.
Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.
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In a new 2-minute TV ad, Barack Obama explains his economic plans and contrasts them with John McCain's. In two other Truth-O-Meter rulings, we examined Obama's claims about his plans for small businesses and the middle class. Here, we'll address his plan for senior citizens.
He says in the ad that "seniors making less than $50,000, who are struggling with the rising costs of food and drugs on fixed incomes, won’t pay income taxes at all."
That is correct. Obama's tax plan specifies that he would "eliminate all income taxation of seniors making less than $50,000 per year." The campaign estimates it will cut taxes an average of $1,400 for 7-million seniors.
It's worth noting that Obama's proposal has been criticized on several fronts.
Some economists have questioned whether it's a wise policy because seniors already receive favorable tax treatment. The Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan tax research group, said Obama's plan would create inequity by eliminating taxes for senior citizens who earn a modest income but continuing to tax younger workers earning the same amount. Also, it would help seniors who are currently paying income taxes but provide no benefit for those too poor to owe any tax.
Still, Obama accurately describes his plan in the ad. We rate his statement True.
When President Barack Obama gave a speech on the economy in Wakarusa, Ind., on Aug. 5, 2009, one of his statements raised the eyebrows of one alert PolitiFact reader. Obama, touting an element of his stimulus package, said that a tax cut “began showing up in paychecks of 4.8 million Indiana households about three months ago.” That struck our reader as odd because the Census Bureau pegs Indiana’s population at 6.3 million, of which one quarter are under 18. What’s the likelihood that the remaining 4.8 million Indiana adults each constitute their own household?
Not likely at all.
When we asked the Indiana Department of Revenue how many tax returns are filed annually in the state, they said the number is around 3.2 million, and that includes both joint filers and individuals.
So clearly Obama was wrong. A White House official confirmed for us that it was a goof, pure and simple. A staffer mistakenly used the number of households in Illinois in Obama's speech, 4.8 million, instead of Indiana, which is 2.4 million.
So there aren't as many Hoosier households as Obama claimed, and he earns a False on the Truth-O-Meter.
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Flash back to the 2008 campaign and you might recall a technology gap between Barack Obama and John McCain.
Obama was portrayed as the youthful candidate of change whose campaign harnessed the Internet in ways no candidate had before. McCain was the senior statesman, a veteran senator and former POW . . . but not someone who was checking his BlackBerry 24/7.
The Obama campaign poked fun at McCain with an ad titled "1982" that portrayed him as an out-of-touch old guy.
"Things have changed in the last 26 years. But McCain hasn't," the announcer said as the screen flashed images flash of a record player and a Rubik's Cube.
"He admits he still doesn't know how to use a computer, can't send an e-mail," the announcer said. We rated that claim Mostly True because it was based on McCain's comments in an interview with journalist Mike Allen.
So imagine our surprise when we heard John King of CNN say in an interview with McCain that the Arizona Republican actually has more Twitter followers than the Obama White House. Here's the exchange:
KING: "I'll close with this one. The John McCain Twitter account has more than 1.1 million followers. The official White House Twitter account has only about 830,000 as of last count. Is it time to replace the Electoral College with the Twitter count?"
MCCAIN: "It is a phenomenal way of communicating."
We checked the Twitter pages and found King is correct about those counts. McCain's page, @SenJohnMcCain (A recent tweet: "Fighting to remove two more pork barrel projects totaling $24.5 million - we will probably lose, again, because it's business as usual in DC") had 1,128,161 followers. The White House account, @whitehouse , had 860,835 (Recent tweet: "Don't believe everything you see on the web about health insurance reform . . . ").
But there's a significant caveat to King's statement: Obama has a second Twitter account that was created during the campaign and is now handled by the Democratic National Committee. That one, @barackobama , had 1,902,667 followers. So add them together and Obama has nearly triple McCain's followers.
One of King's producers correctly noted the caveat in an article on the CNN Web site, but King did not mention it during the interview.
So King is correct with his claim that McCain beats the official White House Twitter account, but viewers might be misled to think that's the total count for Obama when in fact it's just one of his two accounts. So we'll take King down a notch and give him a Mostly True.
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Sen. Hillary Clinton often boasts that she has a long resume.
Asked during a Texas campaign event about the difference between her and Sen. Barack Obama, Clinton replied, "Well, about 35 years of experience."
But we find her math is off.
Although we find
here
that she is largely correct when she says she has 35 years of experience in politics, she has failed to include Obama's experience in her calculation.
By our count, Obama, who is 14 years younger than Clinton, has about one year running a voter-registration project, three years as a community organizer, four as a full-time attorney handling voting rights, employment and housing cases, and 12 years in the Illinois Senate and U.S. Senate. That's a total of 20 years in public policy matters. So the difference between Clinton and Obama is really 15 years.
We rate her claim False.
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Barack Obama made his most direct case for the Democratic nomination at a speech on Jan. 30, 2008, in Denver. He criticized fellow Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton's candidacy, arguing that he represents a more dramatic distinction with John McCain, the apparent Republican frontrunner after winning Florida's primary.
In making his argument, Obama attacked Clinton for voting with Republicans on national security issues, among other things.
After naming a number of areas where he said Clinton and McCain had the same positions, Obama attacked Clinton for diverging from McCain on the issue of torture. Clinton "actually differed with him by arguing for exceptions for torture before changing positions when the politics of the moment changed," Obama said.
It sounds a little convoluted, so here's the step-by-step.
In October 2006, Clinton spoke about exceptions to a no-torture policy when speaking to the
New York Daily News.
Clinton mentioned a "ticking time bomb" scenario in which a captured terrorist has knowledge of an imminent terror attack and interrogators want to use torture.
"In the event we were ever confronted with having to interrogate a detainee with knowledge of an imminent threat to millions of Americans, then the decision to depart from standard international practices must be made by the president, and the president must be held accountable," she said.
"That very, very narrow exception within very, very limited circumstances is better than blasting a big hole in our entire law."
Then, on Sept. 26, 2007, Clinton said something different. During a debate, Tim Russert asked her about the ticking bomb scenario and here's what she said: "As a matter of policy, it cannot be American policy, period." She said she met with military generals who told her there is "very little evidence that it works."
In the days after the debate, the Republican National Committee criticized her for flip-flopping, and Obama said he would oppose torture "without exception or equivocation," according to
Daily News
reports.
Did Clinton change position because of her talks with the generals or because of the "politics of the moment"? We can't see inside Clinton's head, so our ruling doesn't reflect on that part of the statement. But it is clear she changed her mind about the "ticking bomb" scenario. So we rate Obama's claim True.
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Barack Obama made his most direct case for the Democratic nomination at a speech on Jan. 30, 2008, in Denver. He criticized fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton's candidacy, arguing that he represents a more dramatic contrast to John McCain, the apparent Republican front-runner.
In making his argument, Obama attacked Clinton for voting with Republicans on national security issues.
Among Obama's points: "It's time for new leadership that understands that the way to win a debate with John McCain is not by nominating someone who agreed with him on voting for the war in Iraq."
Obama is referring to the 2002 vote authorizing the use of force in Iraq, widely considered to have given President Bush the authority for the invasion. Clinton voted for the measure, as did McCain. Obama was not in the U.S. Senate at that time, though he did give a speech opposing the war while an Illinois state senator.
Obama is right: Clinton and McCain were on the same side in voting for the use of force in Iraq. We find this claim to be True.
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Barack Obama made his most direct case for the Democratic nomination at a speech on Jan. 30, 2008, in Denver. He criticized fellow Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton's candidacy, arguing that he represents a more dramatic distinction with John McCain, the apparent Republican front-runner after winning Florida's primary.
In making his argument, Obama attacked Clinton for voting with Republicans on national security issues, among other things.
Among Obama's points: "It's time for new leadership that understands that the way to win a debate with John McCain is not by nominating someone who ... agreed with him by voting to give George Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran."
On the issue of Iran, Obama is referring to a vote in September 2007 on a measure known as the Kyl-Lieberman Amendment, which declared the Iranian Revolutionary Guard to be a terrorist organization.
Clinton voted in favor of the amendment, which McCain co-sponsored.
Obama advisers argued at the time that the Kyl-Lieberman amendment could be used to justify a military attack on Iran.
We previously fact-checked the advisers' claim that Kyl-Lieberman was a "blank check" for the use of force in Iran. We found that expert opinions were split. Some said the legislation gave no new authority for the use of force in Iran. But others said the Bush administration would point to the legislation as a justification if it wanted to invade Iran, even if the legislation did not specifically condone it. Describing the amendment as "giving George Bush the benefit of the doubt" is similar to that argument.
There are a few other problems with Obama's statement that are worth mentioning. Though McCain co-sponsored the legislation, he missed the vote itself — as did Obama, who was campaigning. Obama said he would have voted against the amendment if he had been present. So though Clinton may have "agreed" with McCain on the issue, they did not technically vote the same way on it.
To say that voting for Kyl-Lieberman is "giving George Bush the benefit of the doubt on Iran" remains a contentious issue. But Obama's main point is that Clinton and McCain were on the same side, and that is correct. So we rate Obama's statement Mostly True.
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It may be the longest chain e-mail we've ever received. A page-by-page analysis of the House health care bill argues that reform will end the health care system as we know it: "Page 29: Admission: your health care will be rationed! ... Page 42: The 'Health Choices Commissioner' will decide health benefits for you. You will have no choice. ... Page 50: All non-US citizens, illegal or not, will be provided with free health care services."
Most of the e-mail's claims are wrong, and you can read our
extended analysis
to find out why.
One of its most bizarre claims is the one about free health care for noncitizens, "illegal or not."
We read the bill and its legislative summary, and could find nothing about free health care for anyone, much less noncitizens.
To confirm our examination, we turned to Jennifer Tolbert, an independent health care analyst at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan foundation that studies health care reform. Tolbert has read and analyzed all the major health proposals, including those of the Republicans, and the foundation provides
point-by-point analyses
of the plans on its Web site.
"No one's provided with free health care. That's ridiculous," she said.
Page 50, which the e-mail references, is part of Section 152, which includes a generic nondiscrimination clause saying that insurers may not discriminate with regard to "personal characteristics extraneous to the provision of high quality health care or related services."
The section says nothing about "non-US citizens" or immigrants, legal or otherwise. In fact, the legislation specifically states that "undocumented aliens" will not be eligible for credits to help them buy health insurance, in Section 246 on page 143.
The bottom line here is the e-mail is making things up. The bill does not say anything close to "All non-US citizens, illegal or not, will be provided with free health care services." We rate this chain e-mail statement Pants on Fire!
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It may be the longest chain e-mail we've ever received. A page-by-page analysis of the House health care bill argues that reform will end the health care system as we know it: "Page 29: Admission: your health care will be rationed! ... Page 42: The 'Health Choices Commissioner' will decide health benefits for you. You will have no choice. ... Page 50: All non-US citizens, illegal or not, will be provided with free health care services."
Most of the e-mail's claims are wrong, and you can read our
extended analysis
to find out why.
But one of the claims is actually true: "All private healthcare plans must conform to government rules to participate in a Healthcare Exchange."
To explain this one, we will start with an explanation of the overall bill, which was unveiled July 14, 2009. The bill envisions that everyone will be required to have health insurance. People who get health insurance through work satisfy this requirement right off the bat.
People who don't get insurance through work or other groups will go to the health care exchange; it's designed to help people who have to go off on their own to buy health insurance, and for small businesses with few employees. The reason for the exchange is that the government wants to regulate insurers to make sure that health plans clearly explain what they offer, can't refuse people for pre-existing conditions, and must offer basic levels of service.
"This is designed to protect consumers from plans that have outrageous cost-sharing or really limited benefits," said Jennifer Tolbert, an independent health care analyst at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan foundation that studies health care reform.
Tolbert has read and analyzed all the major health proposals, including those of the Republicans, and the foundation provides
point-by-point analyses
of the plans on its Web site.
The exchange is meant to ensure that people are "actually getting coverage and not a junk policy," Tolbert added.
We should note that the e-mail says this rule is listed on page 72 of the health care bill. We found that the requirement that insurance companies must conform is also presented much earlier in the bill. We spotted an earlier reference on page 15, Section 101.
That doesn't change the fact that the assertion is correct. We've ruled that many of the e-mail's other claims are wrong, but not this one. The e-mail said, "All private healthcare plans must conform to government rules to participate in a Healthcare Exchange." We rule that True.
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In an article for a conservative Internet journal that has been widely distributed via chain e-mail, former Clinton adviser-turned-foe Dick Morris points out a little-known embarrassment about Sen. Hillary Clinton, who was a star law student at Yale.
"She flunked the D.C. bar exam and only passed the Arkansas bar," he wrote.
It's true.
In his biography of Hillary Clinton, former Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein notes that in the summer of 1973, 817 people took the Washington, D.C., bar exam; 551 of them passed. Hillary Rodham was not one of them.
"For the first time in her life she had flamed out — spectacularly, given the expectations of others for her, and even more so her own," Bernstein wrote.
Bernstein said Clinton kept the news hidden for 30 years and shocked some of her closest friends when she made the revelation with a passing reference in her 2003 autobiography,
Living History.
She even spins it into a positive.
"Despite the satisfaction of my work, I was lonely and missed Bill more than I could stand," she wrote. "I had taken both the Arkansas and Washington, D.C., bar exams during the summer, but my heart was pulling me toward Arkansas. When I learned that I passed in Arkansas but failed in D.C., I thought that maybe my test scores were telling me something."
So she followed Bill Clinton to Arkansas. She became a faculty member in the School of Law at the University of Arkansas, where Bill Clinton also taught. And in 1975, the two married.
Wrote Bernstein: "There can only be conjecture about what turn her life — and the nation's — might have taken had she not failed the exam."
But she did, and this statement is True.
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In his nationally televised news conference on July 22, 2009, President Barack Obama cited a dramatic statistic to emphasize the need for health care reform. He said, “If we don't act, 14,000 Americans will continue to lose their health insurance every single day.”
The White House told us the number came from a report published by the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, and authored by researchers James Kvaal and Ben Furnas. A chart in the report was headlined, “14,000 People Became Uninsured Every Day in December and January.”
We wondered about the methodology and whether the December and January numbers were out of date. We couldn't reach the authors of the study (one has since joined the White House staff). But we tracked down Urban Institute health care scholar John Holahan, whose work was cited in the Center for American Progress study.
Holahan was the co-author, with A. Bowen Garrett, of the January 2009 study, “Rising Unemployment, Medicaid and the Uninsured,” published by the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured. That study provided the underpinning for the Center for American Progress report by estimating how many people can expect to lose their insurance when the national unemployment rate goes up.
Holahan and his co-author, using a baseline of 4.6 percent unemployment in 2007, calculated that 2.6 million people would lose coverage if the unemployment rate climbed to 7 percent; 3.7 million if it went to to 8 percent; 4.8 million at 9 percent; and 5.8 million at 10 percent. The estimates took into account people who lost their jobs but then switched to a spouse’s plan or extended their coverage through COBRA, the federal law that guarantees people who lose their job can still get continued health coverage.
Applying Holahan's calculations to the actual rise in unemployment from November 2008 to June 2009, we came up with 3.2 million people losing health coverage, or an average of 15,238 per day, so it is close to the 14,000 Obama cited.
We asked other health care experts about Holahan’s work, and they uniformly agreed that he is a respected researcher. Only one complicating factor emerged, when we spoke with Edmund F. Haislmaier of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. He noted that Holahan’s paper was written before passage of the federal stimulus package, which contains provisions subsidizing 65 percent of COBRA costs for the unemployed. If these new subsidies end up boosting the use of COBRA — the data hasn't been compiled yet — then it could reduce the number of newly uninsured Americans from the levels that Holahan had predicted and that Obama cited.
Obama was very close to Holohan's calculations — in fact he was slightly low. But as Haislmaier pointed out, the stimulus COBRA provisions could reduce the numbers because more people will still be covered. We can't be sure until the data is in. So in the meantime, we find Obama’s claim Mostly True.
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House Republicans are playing truth-squad with the cap-and-trade bill.
Every day they post one claim about the bill on their Web site in an effort to demonstrate why cap-and-trade, which is intended to slow climate change by limiting carbon dioxide emissions, is bad for consumers. Most Republicans oppose the bill.
"Daily Truth" No. 14, which deals with a government program on wood stoves, caught our eye: "The government is going to tell Americans they need to replace functioning stoves in their homes with 'government-certified' stoves and use taxpayer dollars to do so. The Democrats’ national energy tax is just more government intrusion and more taxpayer dollars used for government-imposed mandates."
From the sound of this claim, it seems like the government would demand all wood stoves be replaced (we imagine packs of bureaucrats knocking down doors and tearing wood stoves out of walls). We wondered whether the cap-and-trade bill really contains such a requirement.
Indeed, the bill does set aside about $20 million to replace old wood or pellet stoves — specifically, stoves manufactured before July 1, 1990 — with newer, more efficient models. The money would help consumers pay for the upgrade. They would receive a 30 percent tax credit for costs incurred, up to $1,500.
As it does with most appliances, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sets efficiency standards for wood stoves, and to get the tax credit, consumers would have to buy one that bears the "EPA certified" label.
Supporters of the stove swap initiative say it could help reduce air pollution. According to the EPA, certified stoves emit about three-fourths less pollution than do older models.
In some parts of the United States, consumers have already taken advantage of a pilot program encouraging people to buy new stoves, and the bill simply expands that to stove owners throughout the country.
Republicans have it partly right about how the program would work. It would use taxpayer money to help consumers upgrade their older, dirtier stoves. And to get the rebate, consumers would have to buy an EPA-approved stove. However, the government is not forcing them to replace the stoves.
"This is not a mandatory program," said Paul Heintz, communications director for Rep. Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat who helped come up with the plan. "Those who own stoves that are either not certified by the EPA or were built before 1990 simply have the opportunity to take advantage of this program. They are under no obligation to do so."
So Republicans are right that taxpayer money is being used to subsidize upgraded stoves but they are distorting how the program works. The government is not "going to tell Americans they need to replace functioning stoves in their homes with 'government-certified' stoves." The government is merely offering an incentive to replace them. So we find the Republican claim Half True.
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It's not entirely clear from the context whether Giuliani is talking about the Democratic presidential candidates or the Democrats in Congress.
But it doesn't really matter, especially since so many in the Democratic field of candidates are in the Senate or the House. Either way, Giuliani is correct that Democrats are open to letting some of the tax cuts of 2001 expire, which would raise taxes for those affected.
Most of the Democratic presidential candidates have said they want to renew some of the those tax cuts, which are scheduled to expire in 2010. But they also have indicated that they would favor allowing tax cuts to expire that, in their view, unfairly benefit wealthy Americans. The tax rate on household incomes above $200,000 would return to higher levels, as would taxes on capital gains, dividends and estates.
But is that a 20 to 30 percent increase?
To defend his claim, the Giuliani campaign points to a Congressional Budget Office report that shows a 31 percent rise in revenue from 2006 to 2011 if all of the tax cuts are allowed to expire.
There are two problems with this. First of all, the Democrats aren't advocating the elimination of
all
of the 2001 tax cuts. And second, the logic of the Giuliani argument is that a rise in revenues is the same as a tax increase.
If that's the standard, than President Bush's own budget for 2008, released in February, includes a 29 percent tax increase over the same period, too.
Nope, that doesn't cut it.
Statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate that New Mexico gained 75,800 jobs from December 2002 to July 2007, which is slightly lower than Richardson's claim.
As our friends at FactCheck.org note in this
article
, Richardson has consistently cited the higher number, even when the actual number was lower.
For our ruling, however, we'll rely on the current 75,800 and call it mostly true.
It's difficult to calculate how big a role his tax cuts played in getting businesses to create those jobs.
James Peach, an economics professor at New Mexico State University, said many factors make a company decide to add jobs and that tax incentives often play only a modest role. Indeed, much of the job growth in the state began before Richardson became governor, Peach said.
Still, Peach said Richardson's tax incentives and income tax cuts have created a favorable atmosphere for business that is a stark change from the state's mentality in the mid-1970s, when state officials refused to provide help to a promising young company named Microsoft.
"The climate here has changed considerably since then," Peach said. "Bill Richardson has been a big part of that. He's not the whole story, but he's been a big part of it."
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Corporate profits have been rising. The Commerce Department reported that corporate profits from current production increased 21.4 percent in 2006 and were up 12.5 percent in 2005.
CEO pay has also gone up. A Forbes report in May 2007 said chief executives of the nation's 500 largest companies got a 38 percent raise in 2006, on top of a 6 percent hike in 2005 and a 54 percent raise in 2004.
And Clinton is right that average wages have been flat. Adjusted for inflation, median family income has been flat since 2001, hovering around $54,000, according to government statistics.
Indeed, Brownback teamed up with Sen. Joe Biden to propose a plan to partition Iraq into three states for the Kurds, Shi'ites and Sunnis with a central government to see to common interests.
Brownback fairly characterizes Romney's position. Romney has not endorsed the plan and published an essay in the July-August issue of Foreign Affairs saying he was opposed to the concept.
"Today, the nation's attention is focused on Iraq," he wrote. "All Americans want U.S. troops to come home as soon as possible. But walking away now or dividing Iraq up into parts and walking away later would present grave risks to the United States and the world. Iran could seize the Shiite south, al Qaeda could dominate the Sunni west, and Kurdish nationalism could destabilize the border with Turkey. A regional conflict could ensue, perhaps even requiring the return of U.S. troops under far worse circumstances."
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Obama's Mideast oil claim, made to the American Federation of State County and Municipal Employees on June 26, is artful sleight-of-hand.
He relies on an extremely optimistic (and possibly unrealistic) notion that the U.S. fleet would average 40-45 mpg at some point in the near future. He does not specify whether he means 40-45 mpg in the equivalent of today's tests (which would mean on-road performance much lower) or if he means on-road. Since he used the testing standard before, we'll assume the same here, which would equate to 35 mpg in the real world. At 35 mpg, Schipper estimates fuel usage could be reduced by about 40 percent.
Instead of simply saying it would reduce fuel use by 40 percent, Obama shrewdly plays on the belief by many Americans that the U.S. is heavily dependent on Mideast oil.
"Contrary to popular belief, we don't import a lot of oil from the Middle East," said
said John DeCicco, a senior fellow for automotive strategies with the advocacy group Environmental Defense.
In fact, the U.S. gets less than 20 percent of its imported oil from the Mideast, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The U.S. gets almost twice as much oil from Canada than it gets from Saudi Arabia.
Obama is correct that a reduction in oil demand because of more fuel efficient cars could theoretically eliminate the need to import any oil from the Mideast. But he ignores the reality of global petroleum markets. "It's not correct to say that we can specify where we buy our oil," Schipper said. "Oil goes into one big world barrel."
Obama's comment "if we import zero oil from the Middle East, that means the gas prices are going to go down at the pump" is a bit of a stretch. Given the volatility of oil prices and the time it, the price at the pump might still go up because of other factors. But under his scenario, it would go up less.
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In a speech to the Detroit Economic Club on May 7, 2007, Obama said the U.S. needs to make more fuel-efficient cars. "While our fuel standards haven't moved from 27.5 miles per gallon in two decades, both China and Japan have surpassed us, with Japanese cars now getting an average of 45 miles to the gallon."
Obama's claim about Japanese cars getting more than 45 mpg involves the fuzzy science of measuring fuel economy, complicated by differing standards in each nation. Obama's campaign says his number comes from a 2004 study by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change that calculated Japanese cars would get 46 mpg if Japan followed the same test methods as the U.S. (Obama accurately says the U.S. mandate has been 27.5 for 20 years.)
Obama's claim is technically correct. But the Pew numbers exaggerate the differences between the countries because those estimates do not reflect real-world conditions, according to Lee Schipper, director of research at the World Resources Institute's Center for Transport and Environment.
He says the Japanese fleet actually averages about 23 mpg on the road today, but is improving. The U.S. number is only slightly lower, about 21, but has been stagnant. The real-world numbers are closer because, despite more fuel-efficient cars in Japan, heavy traffic congestion erases much of the efficiency.
Schipper said Obama "is correct that Japan's fuel efficiency is higher and improving more rapidly, but his number is inaccurate. The number he used doesn't really represent a realistic on-road achievement."
Yet Schipper said he doesn't fault Obama for the confusion. "Everybody makes this mistake. What matters is what cars really get on the road, how long it takes to change the entire fleet and how much people drive." (Japanese drivers drive about one-third as many miles per year as U.S. drivers.)
Richardson is correct, but doesn't mention the fine print.
In touting his economic record as New Mexico's governor, Richardson's campaign produced a TV ad noting the pace of the state's job growth while he's been in office. Although the state was ranked sixth in August 2006 for job growth, it most recently ranked 15th. A more accurate statement would be to say that the state "ranked as high as sixth in the nation."
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At a debate in South Carolina, Tancredo said he could match, stack for stack, the scientific reports that support global warming with those that do not.
In fact, the stacks would be pretty lopsided.
Tancredo is wrong to suggest that climate scientists are evenly split. The overwhelming consensus among them is that humans are the main cause of global warming.
A recent study by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists from more than 130 nations, concluded that there is overwhelming evidence that warming is caused by human activity.
Their February 2007 report said warming was "unequivocal" and that most of it has been caused by greenhouse gas concentrations caused by humans. The report said that humans have caused a significant increase in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide since 1750.
Yes, there have been dissenting studies over the years about global warming. But the IPCC is an effort to forge an international consensus. It has included more than 2,500 expert reviewers, more than 800 authors and more than 450 lead authors working for the past six years.
Indeed, economists have found that the top tier of Americans earn a disproportionately large percent of the income, and they almost always have. The income gap narrowed just after the Great Depression but has been climbing since -- most sharply in the 1980s and 1990s. An analysis of income tax returns by economists Emmanuel Saez at the University of California, Berkley, and Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics found that income going to the top 1 percent doubled from 8 percent of total income earned in the workforce in 1980 to 16 percent in 2004, and reached pre-Depression levels in 2005.
Richardson led a successful effort to raise teacher pay, but we cannot give him a fully truthful ruling because he neglects to mention that he is mixing rankings from two sources.
The ranking of 46th is from the 2002-03 National Education Association survey of teacher pay. The newest NEA ranking, with 2004-05 statistics, only shows New Mexico has climbed to 40th.
The New Mexico chapter of the NEA did its own estimate and concluded that the state now ranks 29th in teacher pay, but the local NEA chapter is run by Charles Bowyer, who identifies himself as a longtime Richardson supporter.
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While it is certainly risky to claim fatherhood of a major policy initiative, there is agreement across a spectrum of political thought that indeed, Thompson was there for the birth, and even for the 2 a.m. feedings.
Former U.S. Rep. E. Clay Shaw, R-Fort Lauderdale, said, "Among the governors, he certainly can take that position. He was more or less the quarterback." Ron Haskins, Senior Fellow, Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, agrees the claim is fair. "In terms of ideas for welfare reform and demonstrating it could work – as political claims go -- it makes sense for Tommy Thompson to make this claim. The role Thompson played at every stage was substantial."
Lawrence Mead, professor of Politics at New York University, and the author of a book on the first "welfare to work" program in the U.S., "Government Matters: Welfare Reform in Wisconsin," agrees "those are fair statements. He didn't do it single-handedly, but he was the crucial, most important single leader."
In 2004, Mead told a conference on welfare reform at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research "Wisconsin took the idea (of welfare to work) to extremes not seen anywhere else in the country. Wisconsin Works, the eventual system that it implemented, is the most radical reform in the country…and is a triumph of government."
The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program was established in 1989, it was the first of its kind. The program allowed low income families to use state funds to send their children, at no cost to them, to the public or private school of their choice.
David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institution, gives Thompson and a Milwaukee state legislator, Polly Williams, "most of the credit" for creating school choice. "The (Milwaukee) school choice reform was pivotal in putting choice on the national agenda."
In an editorial praising Thompson as "America's No. 1 public-policy tinkerer," the Capital Times declared that after welfare reform, "If there is a second "reform" for which Thompson is credited, it is state support of the development of school vouchers."
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"In short, about halfway through fiscal year 2009, Washington has run out of money."
In an op-ed published April 26, House Republican Leader John Boehner laid out a case for "Debt Day."
"It is the day of the Fiscal Year — beginning on Oct. 1 of the previous calendar year — on which total government spending exceeds total federal revenues," Boehner wrote. "And in our current fiscal year, that falls on April 26 — this Sunday, just days before the administration’s 100th day milestone. In short, about halfway through fiscal year 2009, Washington has run out of money."
Now keep in mind, we know "Debt Day" is not a literal concept. Thanks to withholding and estimated taxes, the government collects income tax revenues year-round, and it has other sources of tax revenues as well. It also borrows money by selling U.S. Treasury securities. So the government does not have to shut down because its pockets are empty.
Boehner acknowledges that, calling it a symbol of "our government’s arrogant culture of spending." We were intrigued by the "Debt Day" claim and wanted to check Boehner's numbers for accuracy.
He uses numbers provided by the Congressional Budget Office that are widely regarded as fair and accurate. And he accurately explains how he uses them to calculate debt.
Boehner blames the Obama administration for a "borrowing binge" in his editorial, but it's only fair to note that the 2009 budget started back on Oct. 1, 2008, when Boehner's fellow Republican George W. Bush was president. Parts of that budget were finalized, however, under Obama's watch on March 11, 2009.
Boehner also notes accurately that "Debt Day" has arrived earlier this year than any time in the past decade, since the surpluses that marked the end of the Clinton administration.
Here are the "Debt Days" for previous years, based on CBO numbers. Again, it's important to remember the calendar for these dates starts Oct. 1 of the previous year, not Jan. 1. We've also included the percentage of each year's budget that was actually paid with government revenues, as opposed to borrowing:
2002 - Sept. 2 - 92 percent
2003 - July 29 - 83 percent
2004 - July 27 - 82 percent
2005 - Aug. 14 - 87 percent
2006 - Aug. 27 - 91 percent
2007 - Sept. 9 - 94 percent
2008 - Aug. 5 - 84 percent
2009 - April 26 - 57 percent
Boehner carefully explains how he arrives at the "Debt Day" number, and he uses widely accepted numbers in his calculations. The statement we're checking here is, "In short, about halfway through fiscal year 2009, Washington has run out of money." That "halfway" number is a little bit of a push; it's actually 57 percent of the year. And, the "run out of money" is metaphorical, not literal. But Boehner is right with his central point that we're spending more money than we're taking in, and that the difference is close to the halfway mark this fiscal year. So we rate his statement True.
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President Barack Obama was criticized by conservatives recently for a couple of handshakes and photo opportunities with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez at the Summit of the Americas.
In a news conference after the summit, on April 19, 2009, Obama dismissed those critics, saying the Venezuelan military is not consequential enough to worry about.
According to the
Washington Post,
Obama said, "Venezuela is a country whose defense budget is probably 1/600th of the United States. They own Citgo," the retail arm of Venezuela's national oil company. "It's unlikely that as a consequence of me shaking hands or having a polite conversation with Mr. Chavez that we are endangering the strategic interests of the United States."
Chavez has significantly increased the Venezuelan defense budget in recent years, and so we wondered about the 1/600th figure.
First, the numbers. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Venezuela had a defense budget of $3.3 billion in 2008, up from $2.6 billion in 2007. By comparison the United States is spending $711 billion on the military this year, including the cost of the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. So Obama is slightly underestimating the Venezuelan defense budget. It is actually about 1/215th the size of the United States'.
The size and firepower of U.S. defense forces also dwarf Venezuela's. But Chavez has made headlines in recent years for his efforts to ramp up and modernize the Venezuelan military, purchasing nearly $3 billion worth of assault rifles, fighter jets and helicopters from Russia. Venezuela also has made large defense purchases from Spain, Belarus and China, for everything from patrol boats and ammunition to radar systems for military air operations.
Even with that, Venezuela is still "at best a second-rate regional power," said Larry Birns, director of the nonprofit Center on Hemispheric Affairs, which researches and reports on Latin American affairs.
"Historically, the Venezuelan military has been a fairly rag-tag outfit, heavily politicized and exceedingly corrupt," Birns said. Even with Chavez's efforts to improve the military, "They just don't have the stuff that could pose a serious threat to the United States."
According to a May 2007 analysis prepared by COHA research fellow Alex Sanchez, "Even if Venezuela is upgrading its military more than other countries in its category, it is most likely doing so for defensive purposes. It would be ludicrous to believe that the country would launch any kind of military aggression against the U.S., shooting at Stealth bombers with rifles."
So, yes, Obama's numbers were a little off. We're not going to ding him too hard for that, though, as his overall point is correct. And Obama's use of the word
probably
1/600th suggests it is more of a guestimate than a hard statistic. The Venezuelan military is indeed a tiny fraction of the size of the U.S. military. And so we rule his statement Mostly True.
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Long since eclipsed by Iraq, the Afghan conflict, known to the military as Operation Enduring Freedom, has often been relegated to the back pages of the newspaper.
Even as it has faded from view, however, the war has grown ever deadlier, President Barack Obama said in a speech to government officials and military officers at the White House on March 27, 2009.
"It's been more than seven years since the Taliban was removed from power, yet war rages on, and insurgents control parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan," Obama said, announcing the deployment of 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan. "Attacks against our troops, our NATO allies, and the Afghan government have risen steadily. And most painfully, 2008 was the deadliest year of the war for American forces."
We wondered if that was true and checked the latest
Pentagon statistics
. Indeed, U.S. military deaths numbered 155 in 2008, which is the highest since the war began in 2001.
The number of U.S. deaths has increased almost every year, with two exceptions. The year-to-year fatality count, from 2001 to 2008, is: 11, 48, 45, 52, 98, 98, 117, 155.
In the first two months of 2009, there were 30 U.S. military deaths, putting this year on pace to be the deadliest yet.
We looked for any indication that this statistic was unrepresentative of the conditions in Afghanistan. Quite the contrary — it is one of several measures by which the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated.
The number of U.S. military personnel wounded in action has also increased every year, from 33 in 2001 to 790 in 2008, totaling 2,713.
Military deaths of personnel from the 21 other outside countries involved in the conflict have increased every year since 2004, to a peak so far of 139 in 2008 (and 2009 is on pace to surpass that).
Afghan civilian casualties hit a high mark too last year, with 2,118 civilians killed, up from 1,523 in 2007, according to the United Nations.
In testimony to the House Armed Services Committee in September, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Taliban and al-Qaida fighters are coordinating better from safe havens in Pakistan and launching "ever more sophisticated, even infantry-like attacks against fixed coalition positions."
"I'm not convinced we're winning it in Afghanistan," Mullen said.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates told the committee Afghanistan was in some ways a more complex challenge than Iraq. "We don't have a single adversary," he said. "We have the Taliban, we have the Gulbuddin Hekmatyar group, we have the Haqqani network, we have narco-thugs, we have al-Qaida, we have foreign fighters."
So Obama's claim is not only technically correct, but also accurately reflects the deteriorating security conditions in Afghanistan. We find his claim to be True.
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Republicans have made it clear they're opposed to the nomination of Dawn Johnsen to head the White House Office of Legal Counsel. They're unhappy with her support of abortion rights, but a recent blog posting made a surprising allegation: That she said motherhood was "involuntary servitude."
We wondered if she was really was so impolitic as to attack motherhood. And if so, does she have it in for apple pie as well?
The allegation came from the Web site of the House Republican Conference:
"At least 45 House Republicans have co-signed a letter to President Barack Obama in opposition to his nomination of Dawn Johnson [sic] for the head of the Office of Legal Counsel," the site says in a
blog post
. The post continued: "Her brazen pro-abortion stances [include] a Supreme Court amicus brief where she called motherhood 'involuntary servitude.'"
The Republicans are referring to a 1989 brief in
Webster vs. Reproductive Health Services,
a case that tested whether states could prohibit abortions in public health institutions. Johnsen was then legal director of the National Abortion Rights Action League, one of 77 organizations to sign the brief.
Footnote 23, part of the brief that Johnsen said in a Senate hearing that she wrote, said the following: "While a woman might choose to bear children gladly and voluntarily, statutes that curtail her abortion choice are disturbingly suggestive of involuntary servitude, prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment, in that forced pregnancy requires a woman to provide continuous physical service to the fetus in order to further the state's asserted interest. Indeed, the actual process of delivery demands work of the most intense and physical kind: labor of 12 or more grueling hours of contractions is not uncommon."
So Johnsen compared "forced pregnancy" — not motherhood — to involuntary servitude.
After we asked the Republican Conference about the claim, staffer Ericka Andersen acknowledged it was wrong. "You are correct that the post was written inaccurately," she told us in an e-mail. She corrected the post to say Johnsen "equated forced pregnancy with 'involuntary servitude.'"
Kudos to the conference for acknowledging the error. But we still find the original claim False.
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The Oracle of Omaha is still for Obama. So the president claimed on
60 Minutes
, interrupting interviewer Steve Kroft to tout the continued support of Warren Buffett, the Omaha-based stock-picker extraordinaire.
"Your plan really for solving the banking crisis was met with very, very, very tepid response," Kroft said to Obama. "A lot of people said they didn't understand it. A lot of people said it didn't have any, enough details to solve the problem. I know you're coming out with something next week on this. But these criticisms were coming from people like Warren Buffett, people who had supported you, and you had counted as being your..."
"And Warren still does support me," Obama interjected. "But I think that, understand, Warren's also a big player in the financial markets who's a major owner of Wells Fargo. And so he's got a perspective from the perspective of somebody who is part owner of a bank."
Indeed Buffett, who endorsed Obama during the campaign, did explicitly say during a three-hour interview March 9 with CNBC that he still supports Obama.
"I voted for Obama and I strongly support him, and I think he's the right guy," Buffett said early in the interview.
Buffett did criticize Obama's handling of the banking crisis, saying that "a bank that's going to go broke should be allowed to go broke," as long as the depositors are protected. (Obama's approach has leaned toward giving the banks more bailout money in some form rather than letting them fail and having the government take them over.)
But Buffett's primary concern was that Obama wasn't communicating clearly with the public about struggling banks. "The right answer for me (to the banking crisis) is the president to clarify things as only he can, because you have heard so many different things," he said. "He is the commander in chief on this, and it has to be clarified ... because if people aren't clear, they're going to be confused. And if they're going to be confused, they are going to be scared stiff. And that has to end."
It's not surprising Buffett would want Obama to focus on the financial crisis — it has cost Buffett $25 billion. That's how much of his $62 billion fortune he lost in the past year, as shares of his holding company Berkshire Hathaway fell nearly 50 percent,
Forbes
reports. That knocked Buffett off his perch as the world's richest man, to No. 2 behind Bill Gates.
Toward the end of the three-hour interview, Buffett reiterated his support for Obama. "He is the right president," Buffett said. "He's very, very smart. He's got, I think, exactly the right goals. He's articulate and I — you know, he will be the right person to be the commander in chief in this economic crisis."
So clearly Obama was on solid ground touting Buffett's continued support. We find this claim to be True.
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Responding to a question about whether Americans are better off than they were eight years ago, Mike Huckabee tried to deflect some of the blame for the nation's economy away from President Bush and onto Congress, which he portrayed as fiscally reckless.
"We've got a Congress who sat around on their hands and done nothing but spend a lot of money and they're spending, leaving us $9-trillion in debt that we're passing on to our grandchildren," he said during a Jan. 30, 2008, Republican debate at the Ronald Reagan Library.
Huckabee is correct there is a $9-trillion debt — actually, it's $9.2-trillion — and that it will be left to future generations to repay. And he's right about federal spending; it rose a cumulative 53 percent between 2000 and 2007. Because taxes and other receipts didn't rise as fast, the debt soared.
But the former Arkansas governor overlooks the fact that President Bush asked for most of the changes that drove up spending, most notably the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts that were not fullly offset by spending cuts and the 2003 Medicare prescription drug bill, which drove up entitlement costs. There also were national security spending increases after 9/11 and the cost of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Republican-controlled Congresses delivered on each of these high-priority items, and Bush signed them into law. So at a minimum, the president and Congress share the blame for the fiscal policies Huckabee cites in the eight-year time frame. For that reason, we rate his statement Half True.
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A day ahead of the Florida primary, John McCain unleashed an attack on rival Mitt Romney in an automatic phone call to Republican voters.
It's identical to something Rudy Giuliani said about Romney when the former New York mayor was still in the race. We examined the Giuliani charge and concluded it was
Mostly True.
As reported by
Politico.com
, the McCain robocall is a woman apparently concerned about Romney's social conservative record. A McCain spokesman confirmed for us that the call came from the campaign but did not provide the official text.
Here is the transcript of the call courtesy of
Politico
:
"I'm calling with an urgent Mitt Romney [unintelligible]"
"We care deeply about traditional values and protecting families. And we need someone who will not waver in the White House: ending abortion, preserving the sanctity of marriage, stopping the trash on the airwaves and attempts to ban God from every corner of society. These issues are core to our being.
"Mitt Romney thinks he can fool us. He supported abortion on demand, even allowed a law mandating taxpayer funding for abortion. He says he changed his mind, but he still hasn't changed the law. He told gay organizers in Massachusetts he would be a stronger advocate for special rights than even Ted Kennedy. Now, it's something different.
"Unfortunately, on issue after issue Mitt Romney has treated social issues voters as fools, thinking we won't catch on. Sorry, Mitt, we know you aren't trustworthy on the most important issue and you aren't a conservative.
"Paid for by John McCain 2008."
The statement the the call refers to comes from Romney's 1994 U.S. Senate campaign against Kennedy. During the race, Romney wrote a letter to the Log Cabin Republicans, a group of gay Republicans, thanking them for their support.
"For some voters it might be enough for me to simply match my opponent's record in this area," Romney wrote in October 1994. "But I believe we can and must do better. If we are to achieve the goals we share, we must make equality for gays and lesbians a mainstream concern. My opponent cannot do this. I can and will."
As with our previous ruling on this same attack, we find it Mostly True. McCain is right that Romney promised to be more supportive of gay rights than Kennedy had been, but he loses some points by using the term "special rights." What Romney actually advocated was equality for gay and lesbian Americans; nothing "special."
Yes, it's a small point. But for a politician like McCain, who took such grief over the misuse by his opponents of the term "amnesty" to describe his proposal for illegal immigrants, it's reasonable to expect a little more precision.
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Mitt Romney discussed his detailed economic proposals at a Republican debate in Boca Raton, Fla., prefacing his comments with the need to get money into the hands of people who will spend it.
Speaking favorably of the Bush stimulus plan, Romney said, "What's effective is, first, he's getting money back to consumers. And given the fact that two-thirds of our economy is a consumer economy, getting money back into the hands of our citizens, a lot of them paying a lot for gasoline, a lot for heating oil, a lot of people concerned about how to make ends meet, that makes sense to me."
It made us wonder: Two-thirds of our economy geared to consumption? Is that true?
Consumption includes pretty much everything we spend our money on. The major components of consumption include things like food, apparel and services, transportation, health care and entertainment.
The latest data available from the third quarter of 2007 show that personal consumption expenditures in the United States made up 70 percent of the gross domestic product, with a split of 7.7 percent for durable goods, 20.4 percent for nondurable goods, and 41.9 percent for services.
Turns out Romney is on the money. We rate his statement True.
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Mitt Romney says he is a supporter of gun rights and a fan of Ronald Reagan. But he didn't always tout those positions, a fact that John McCain uses to mock Romney in a new Internet ad.
Romney took positions favorable to gun control in previous races in Massachusetts, a state with strict gun control laws.
In 1994, Romney ran for U.S. Senate against incumbent Democrat Ted Kennedy. During that campaign, Romney supported two gun control measures: the Brady Bill, which required background checks for gun purchases, and a ban on certain types of assault weapons.
In 2002, Romney ran for governor, successfully beating Shannon P. O'Brien. During that campaign Romney said, "We have tough gun laws in Massachusetts; I support them." The McCain ad accurately quotes Romney on this point.
Also during the 1994 race, Kennedy attacked Romney as a conservative similar to Ronald Reagan. (He didn't mean it as a compliment.) That's when Romney responded, "I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush. I'm not trying to return to Reagan-Bush."
Romney made his most detailed defenses to these apparent flip-flops in an interview with Bob Schieffer on CBS News'
Face the Nation
on Oct. 21, 2007.
On the gun issue, Romney said, "I support Second Amendment rights, but I don't line up 100 percent with the NRA. ... But my positions are the same as my positions have been with regards to guns for a long, long time, and that is that I respect the right of people to bear arms, and whether that's for hunting or personal protection. I sought the support of the NRA when I ran for governor, and I got it."
Unfortunately for Romney, he later had to revise his statement that he had the support of the NRA in the governor's race. The NRA did not endorse in that race. (See our previous check on that statement
here
.)
On his Reagan comment: "Well, when I was running in '94 I wasn't trying to return to Reagan-Bush because that was characterized as a very different posture than what I was running for. ... And Senator Kennedy in the debate was saying, `Oh, you're just turning yourself into Reagan-Bush.' I said, 'No, I'm my own person.' "
Romney has been attacked on these issues before; we checked an earlier claim
here
.
McCain's ad accurately conveys Romney's positions now and during the previous times Romney has run for office. The ad clearly labels which statements were made during which campaign. For this reason, we find the ad's statements True.
For more on McCain's ad attacking Romney, see our story
here
.
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A new ad from John McCain makes the case that Mitt Romney has not always opposed abortion. Romney has acknowledged that this is the case.
When Romney ran for office in Massachusetts — unsuccessfully for U.S. Senate in 1994 and successfully for governor in 2002 — he often said he supported abortion rights.
McCain's ad highlights a few of those statements.
"I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country," Romney said in a 1994 debate with Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy.
In a 2002 debate, Romney said there was no difference between his views and that of his Democratic opponent, Shannon P. O'Brien. "I will preserve and protect a woman's right to choose, and am devoted and dedicated to honoring my word in that regard," Romney said.
In 2007, Romney said his views have changed. "And I get tired of people that are holier than thou because they've been prolife longer than I have," he said at a Republican debate on Aug. 5, 2007.
(
PolitiFact.com
looked at Romney's abortion record previously; check out our stories
here
and
here
.)
McCain's ad accurately conveys Romney's positions now and during the previous times Romney has run for office. The ad clearly labels which statements were made during which campaign. For this reason, we find the ad's statements True.
For more on McCain's ad attacking Romney, see our story
here
.
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Mitt Romney has repeatedly charged John McCain with flip-flopping on tax cuts. He points out that McCain twice voted against President Bush's tax changes before deciding to support them. He repeated his attack at the Republican debate in Boca Raton.
Though Romney omits some important details, we again find that he is accurately summarizing McCain's record.
In 2001, McCain voted against a $1.35-trillion tax cut package, arguing that the tax cuts didn't do enough for the middle class, and because of a need for increased defense spending. Two years later, McCain again citied spending for opposing $350-billion in additional tax cuts, specifically citing the unknown costs for the war in Iraq.
But in 2006, McCain changed position and voted to extend the Bush tax cuts for five years. He said not to do so would be tantamount to raising taxes at a time when the economy was sputtering.
McCain said he supported the tax-cut extensions, which reduced tax rates on capital gains and dividend income, because "American businesses and investors need a stable and predictable tax policy to continue contributing to the growth of our economy. These considerations lead me to the conclusion that we should not reverse course by letting higher tax rates take effect."
In an interview on Fox News on Dec. 28, 2007, he expressed no regrets about his tax votes against Bush. He said he would have preferred a plan that included spending cuts as well as tax cuts, but added that he believes the tax cuts should now be made permanent.
"We presided over the greatest increase in the size of government since the Great Society," McCain said. "Spending went completely out of control. It's still out of control. Wasteful earmark spending is a disgrace, and it caused us to alienate our Republican base. So these tax cuts need to be made permanent. Otherwise, they would have the effect of tax increases. But, look, if we had gotten spending under control, we'd be talking about more tax cuts today."
McCain has responded by calling Romney a flip-flopper on taxes and other issues, but the fact remains: McCain voted the way Romney says. We find Romney's claim to be True. And if you'd like to see our previous same rulings on this issue, see
here
and
here.
Updated:
This post has been updated to correct the reasons McCain gave at the time for opposing tax cuts in 2001. Our initial posting attributed his reasons to statements he made later about fiscal restraint.
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Ronald Reagan is back on the campaign trail.
And this time, it's not the Republicans vying to claim his political DNA. It's the leading Democratic candidates, running as far as they can from the former president.
The latest claim in this debate comes from Barack Obama, who hits Hillary Clinton's Reagan record as he fights off
false attacks from Bill Clinton
on the very same thing.
Obama tries turning the tables on Clinton in a radio ad that makes passing reference to her views on Reagan.
"But it was Hillary Clinton, in an interview with Tom Brokaw, who quote 'paid tribute' to Ronald Reagan's economic and foreign policy," an announcer says in an
Obama radio advertisement
that aired in South Carolina.
The Illinois senator made a similar point during the Jan. 21, 2008, Democratic debate in Myrtle Beach, S.C.
On both counts, Obama's assertion about Clinton's praise of Reagan is basically true. But a couple of significant points need to be made. First, Clinton didn't use the words "paid tribute," which the radio announcer says in quotations. That's how Brokaw summarized Clinton's remarks.
(It's worth noting that the Obama campaign said it pulled this ad from the air shortly after Clinton's campaign did the same with one bashing Obama's remarks on Reagan.)
And second, you have to read what Brokaw actually attributes to Clinton. Clinton's comments in question come from Brokaw's book,
Boom: Voices of the Sixties
. Brokaw notes Clinton's '60s rhetoric from her college days and writes about the current political climate.
Then this passage from page 403 and 404:
"She also believes modern conservatives such as Karl Rove are 'obsessed' with defeating her.
"She prefers the godfather of the modern conservative movement, Ronald Reagan. He was, she says, 'a child of the Depression, so he understood it [economic pressures on the working and middle class]. When he had those big tax cuts and they went too far, he oversaw the largest tax increase. He could call the Soviet Union the Evil Empire and then negotiate arms-control agreements. He played the balance and the music beautifully.'
"In 1969, who would have imagined that the Hillary Rodham on the Wellesley commencement stage would find herself 38 years later paying tribute to Ronald Reagan?"
Compare that text with Obama's ad, and you'll see that Clinton didn't offer overall praise for Reagan's economic record. In fact, what she did was single out what she saw as his appreciation for the challenges of the working class and his willingness to reverse course when taxes were cut too much.
It's true that Brokaw summarized this as paying tribute, but it still looks to us like the Obama ad somewhat mischaracterizes what Clinton said about Reagan. This leads us to rate it Half True.
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John McCain has attacked Hillary Clinton, saying she wants to "wave the white flag of surrender" in Iraq. He said it again in response to a question about Iraq at the Jan. 24, 2008, Republican debate in Boca Raton. (His comments come near the end of the YouTube video, at 9:45.)
It's hard to believe Hillary Clinton would say something so impolitic. Did she?
It's a harsh paraphrase of what she actually said in the Jan. 21, 2008, Democratic debate in Myrtle Beach, S.C.
Here's the full exchange:
Question: "Last week, you said the next president will, quote, 'have a war to end in Iraq.' In light of the new military and political progress on the ground there in Iraq, are you looking to end this war or win it?"
Clinton: "I'm looking to bring our troops home, starting within 60 days of my becoming president, and here's why, Joe. I have the greatest admiration for the American military. I serve on the Senate Armed Services Committee. I've been to Iraq three times. I've met with the leaders of the various factions. But there is no military solution, and our young men and women should not remain as the referees of their conflict.
"I believe what you're seeing happen is twofold. Of course the surge, the so-called surge, was able to pacify certain parts of Iraq. If we put enough of our men and women and equipment in, we're going to be able to have some tactical military success. But the whole purpose of the surge was to force the Iraqi government to move quickly towards the kind of resolution that only it can bring about.
"I think what is motivating the Iraqi government is the debate in the political campaign here. They know they will no longer have a blank check from George Bush, that I will withdraw troops from Iraq. And I believe that will put even more pressure on the Iraqis to finally make the decisions that they have to make."
McCain is right that Clinton is setting a time frame to start withdrawing troops, and that does imply giving up and waving a metaphorical white flag. Saying there is no military solution as she does could be seen as a form of surrender. But technically, there is no ruling army to surrender to, which is really what a white flag means. Clinton just wants the troops to come home.
So McCain is right when he says Clinton is advocating withdrawal from Iraq. But he uses a highly charged term that somewhat overstates the conditions to which she's referring to end U.S. involvement in Iraq. For this reason, we rate his attack Half True.
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Mitt Romney likes to trumpet his experience in the private sector. He was the head of the 2002 Winter Olympics and founder of Bain Capital, a venture capital and investment firm.
During a campaign rally in Pensacola on Jan. 25, 2008, the day after a Republican debate, Romney boasted, "I was pretty proud of being the only guy on the stage that ever had a job in the private sector."
He needs to check the resumes of his rivals.
Three of the four other candidates on the stage with Romney at the Boca Raton debate have private sector experience.
Rep. Ron Paul was an obstetrician from 1968 to 1996 and has delivered more than 4,000 babies. That sounds like the private sector to us.
Mike Huckabee has held several private sector jobs. He was a minister at Immanuel Baptist Church in Pine Bluff, Ark., the producer of radio and TV ads and a founder of KBSC-TV, a Christian TV station in Texarkana, Ark., now known as KLFI-TV. He served as the station's president from 1987 through 1992. He hosted a show called
Positive Alternatives
and, during his tenure, the station started airing Texarkana football.
Rudy Giuliani has spent much of his career in public service, but he practiced law with the firm of Patterson, Belknap, Webb and Tyler from 1977 to 1981. When he stepped down from being mayor of New York in 2002, he founded Giuliani Partners, a consulting firm in emergency preparedness, public safety, crisis management, energy and health care. In 2005, he became a partner in Bracewell & Giuliani, a large law firm.
When we inquired with a spokeswoman for the Romney campaign about the remark, she said Romney was referring to
business
experience. But we find plenty of the private-sector experience of the other candidates to be in business – especially Giuliani's work for the consulting firm, Huckabee's work at the Christian TV station and Paul's work running a medical practice. And so we find Romney's statement to be False.
(For a PolitiFact chart summarizing the candidates' experience, click
here.)
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With heightened fears of a recession, Bill Clinton wants you to remember the good old days, the days of Spice Girls and Starbucks and economic prosperity ... the 1990s. The days when, you know, he was president. In a radio ad that is running in South Carolina, Bill Clinton suggests things could be like that again, if you elect his wife.
"The 1990s were a time of prosperity," Clinton says in the ad. "We created more than 22-million new jobs, moved 8-million people out of poverty, and turned our economy around.
"It's time for another comeback, time to make America great again. I know Hillary's the one who can do it."
There are two main statistics in this advertisement (which Hillary Clinton has also thrown out from time to time), and we find that Bill Clinton is on target on both.
The first is about new jobs. According to Bureau of Labor statistics, the number of employees on nonagricultural payrolls went from 109.7-million in January 1993 (when Clinton took office) to 132.5-million in January 2001 (when Clinton checked out). Net gain: 22.8-million new jobs.
The other claim is fewer people living in poverty. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of people living in poverty went from 38-million in 1992 to 31-million in 2000; not quite 8-million as Bill Clinton said, but pretty close.
"The hard numbers are correct, but how much of that can you attribute to Clinton's policies?" said James Sherk, a labor policy analyst for the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Keep in mind, Sherk said, the country was beginning to come out of a recession before Clinton took office. And much of the dramatic change came after 1995 when Republicans had secured control of Congress. Sherk noted that Clinton initially opposed the Welfare Reform Act, which Sherk believes may have been the biggest catalyst in reducing poverty numbers.
Sherk says Clinton was also a little lucky.
"He had the good fortune to be in office at the height of the tech bubble," he said. "It makes his time in office look good in ways he can't take credit for."
Gary Burtless, an economist with the Brookings Institute, says there's no getting around the numbers.
Sure, Burtless said, the dot.com craze may have helped the economic numbers, and some may argue that the U.S. economy was due for an up-cycle during the 1990s, "but the fact is, there was significant economic growth during that period. It's tough to get around that."
"To the degree that a president can effect economic progress," Burtless said, "most would say Bill Clinton did well above average."
Let the partisan folks argue about whether Bill Clinton deserves credit for the numbers, or whether Hillary Clinton can recreate them. The numbers are right. We rate Bill Clinton's statement True.
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A campaign mailer from the Republican Party of Florida attacked Barack Obama on the issue of the economy. We received the mailer on Oct. 22, 2008.
"How do Barack Obama's plans impact your budget?" reads the mailer.
"Will you count on Social Securty? Obama plan: Raise Social Security taxes."
Obama has floated proposals to raise Social Security taxes, but only on those who have incomes of about $250,000 a year and above.
To be clear, when we talk about Social Security taxes, we're talking about payroll taxes paid by workers who have not yet retired ( not taxes on the benefits of retirees). Most workers currently pay 6.2 percent of their earnings in Social Security taxes, on earnings up to a limit of about $102,000 in 2008.
If you want to look at your own pay stub, the line that represents Social Security taxes is usually labeled FICA OASDI, which stands for Federal Insurance Contributions Act Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance. Now you know.
The Social Security system is expected to need more money after the baby boomers retire. One of Obama's proposals to address problems with the program is to begin taxing benefits on higher incomes that are now exempt. He proposes to start taxing income of $250,000 and higher at a rate somewhere between 2 and 4 percent, and this includes an employer contribution, so the cost to the worker would likely be between 1 and 2 percent. By the way, people who make $250,000 or more make up roughly 3 percent of everyone who files taxes.
So Obama does propose raising Social Security taxes. But the raise would hit only a small portion of the population. We find the Republican Party of Florida's statement to be overly broad and rate it Half True.
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Back during the Republican primaries, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney accused John McCain of flip-flopping on abortion. Romney was actually defending his own changes of position by arguing that other politicians change position, too.
"(McCain) said he was opposed to overturning Roe v. Wade. Now he's for overturning Roe v. Wade," Romney said in April 2007.
The charge stems from remarks McCain made on the campaign trail when he was running for president in 1999. McCain had answered written questionnaires saying he opposed Roe v. Wade, but when the
San Francisco Chronicle
and CNN asked him about it that year, McCain said, "I'd love to see a point where it (the court ruling) is irrelevant, and could be repealed because abortion is no longer necessary. But certainly in the short-term, or even the long-term, I would not support repeal of Roe vs. Wade, which would then force X number of women in America to (undergo) illegal and dangerous operations."
Anti-abortion Republicans immediately criticized the statement, and McCain aides started backpedaling, noting that McCain misspoke when he used the phrase “even in the long term.” McCain said in an interview a few months later, “I clearly misspoke there. I’m a person who’s made mistakes in this campaign, and I’ll continue to make mistakes. My voting record is clear, of 17 years of pro-life. I continue to hold that position, and I … continue to believe that Roe vs. Wade was a very flawed decision, as in the opinion of most experts.”
In South Carolina in 2007, McCain said, “I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned.” His Web site also reiterates that stance. "John McCain believes Roe vs. Wade is a flawed decision that must be overturned, and as president he will nominate judges who understand that courts should not be in the business of legislating from the bench," the Web site states. "Constitutional balance would be restored by the reversal of Roe vs. Wade, returning the abortion question to the individual states."
We find McCain's brief remark of support falls well short of a full-fledged change in position. His voting record on abortion appears to be solidly anti-abortion, though he differs with some anti-abortion advocacy groups on the issues of campaign finance reform and stem cell research, which he supports. On the Flip-O-Meter scale, we rate McCain's position on Roe v. Wade as a No Flip.
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In an interview with Fox News, John McCain was asked about Barack Obama's claim that 95 percent of Americans will not see their taxes go up under Obama's proposals.
"You spent a lot of time in your debate dealing with that. Is that honest? Is that truthful?" commentator Sean Hannity asked in the Oct. 12, 2008, interview.
"Well, first of all, it's not truthful in the respect that 50 percent or 40 percent of the American people — of taxpayers — American citizens don't pay taxes, federal income taxes," McCain said.
McCain's statement is phrased a little awkwardly, but the context of the conversation makes it clear that he's talking about the number of tax filers who don't owe any income tax thanks to credits and deductions.
In their conversation, Hannity and McCain also say that Obama has promised a tax cut for 95 percent of "Americans," which would be all tax filers. But Obama's policies do not provide a tax cut for 95 percent of
Americans
— it's actually about 81 percent of all American tax filers.
Sometimes, though, Obama is more careful in his statements and claims that his tax put will give 95 percent of "working families" a tax cut. This percentage for workers holds up pretty well even if you do not consider people who don't owe taxes. For more on why that is,
read our story here
.
For this ruling, however, we wanted to focus on how many people don't pay federal taxes because they qualify for enough credits or deductions that they don't owe any taxes. Common credits include the earned income tax credit for low-wage workers, the child tax credit, education credits, and credits for child care expenses. Common deductions include medical and dental expenses, mortgage interest, charitable contributions, educational expenses and business expenses.
Many credits are refundable, which means the government sends a check if the taxes owed are less than zero. Deductions generally reduce taxes owed to zero, with no check sent if the tax bill is less than zero.
We consulted the nonpartisan experts at the Tax Policy Center. They said that the percent of taxpayers with zero or negative individual income tax liability will be 38 percent in 2009.
That's pretty close to 40 percent, the low end of the range McCain said. If McCain had said it was 40 percent, we would have ruled that his statement was True, because he would only be two points off. But he also said it could be around 50 percent, and that seems like pushing the envelope a tad too far. So we rate his statement Mostly True.
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Sen. John McCain revived a claim against Barack Obama that Obama voted to raise taxes on people making $42,000 a year.
“He voted twice for a budget resolution that increases the taxes on individuals making $42,000 a year,” McCain said in the presidential debate Oct. 15, 2008, at Hofstra University.
This time, McCain correctly noted the tax votes came on budget resolutions. But we’ve reviewed this charge before and found that McCain was stretching the truth. He does again this time, though not as badly.
Obama voted in March 2008 and June 2008 for budget resolutions. They are blueprints for the federal budget. The resolutions set targets for the committees that write legislation on taxes and spending. The resolutions, approved on mostly party-line votes, expressed support for rolling back tax cuts enacted under President Bush for people making $42,000 a year and higher.
So the McCain campaign is correct that Obama voted for the measures, which expressed approval for tax increases.
But it’s inaccurate to suggest that votes on nonbinding budget resolutions, which don’t have the force of law and don’t include precise details on taxes or spending, are the same as votes on legislation that actually increases taxes. The resolutions would not change the tax code.
Moreover, Obama as a candidate has proposed tax increases for couples earning $250,000 or more a year, or singles earning $200,000 or more.
We rated previous versions of McCain’s charge as Barely True. Although McCain added context to his charge, it doesn’t change the fact that the votes were never expected to raise taxes. So we rate the latest version of McCain’s statement Half True.
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During a discussion of climate change and energy imports during the third presidential debate, Sen. John McCain detoured briefly to Canada.
McCain attacked Sen. Barack Obama's position on the North American Free Trade Agreement. Here's his claim in context:
"I think we can, for all intents and purposes, eliminate our dependence on Middle Eastern oil and Venezuelan oil. Canadian oil is fine," McCain said during the Oct. 15, 2008, debate. "By the way, when Senator Obama said he would unilaterally renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Canadians said, 'Yes, and we'll sell our oil to China.' You don't tell countries you're going to unilaterally renegotiate agreements with them."
What we take McCain's claim to mean is that Obama said he would renegotiate NAFTA whether or not Canada and Mexico – the other signatories to the trade agreement – want to do so, or renegotiate in such a way as to impose additional burdens on them but not on the United States.
It's true that Obama has been harshly critical of NAFTA on the campaign trail, citing shortfalls in its protections for workers and the environment. He has used words like "devastating" and "a big mistake" to describe the agreement.
Obama was particularly critical of NAFTA in February in the run-up to the Ohio Democratic primary. In a debate, he said, "We should
use the hammer of a potential opt-out as leverage to ensure that we actually get labor and environmental standards that are enforced."
In a June 20, 2008 conference call with reporters, Obama surrogate Sen. Sherrod Brown, the Ohio Democrat, said he was "absolutely confident Barack Obama
will reopen the negotiations on
NAFTA.
I have been assured by him and his top economic advisers there is no question his position is constant and will stay that way on the North American Free Trade Agreement."
But would Obama do so "unilaterally"? In a June interview with
Fortune
magazine, he indicated he would not.
"I'm not a big believer in doing things unilaterally," he told the magazine of his plans on NAFTA. "I'm a big believer in opening up a dialogue and figuring out how we can make this work for all people."
It's difficult to reconcile these two stands. There's little indication
Canada
wants to renegotiate the agreement, so it's not clear how Obama would do so without initiating the negotiation "unilaterally."
Perhaps it was a bit misleading for McCain to highlight Obama's harsher rhetoric on NAFTA instead of his softer stance. But only a bit – the fact is, Obama has often spoken of NAFTA in such a way that a fair listener would conclude he would press to renegotiate it regardless of how the other parties feel.
Characterizing that as a "unilateral" renegotiation, though not the clearest language in the world, was a pretty fair shorthand for McCain to use. We find his claim Mostly True.
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John McCain talked a lot about "Joe the Plumber" during the third presidential debate, saying Joe is an example of a small business owner who would not do well under Barack Obama's policies.
"Now, my old buddy, Joe, Joe the plumber, is out there," McCain said. "Now, Joe, Senator Obama's plan, if you're a small business ... if you don't adopt the health care plan that Senator Obama mandates, he's going to fine you."
McCain used this charge during the second debate as well. We found it False then, and it's still problematic now.
Here's the outline of Obama's plan: It expands health care coverage for those who don't have it by a number of strategies, such as creating national pools for individuals to buy their own insurance. It increases eligibility for the poor and children to enroll in initiatives like Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. And it aims at reining in costs for everyone by streamlining medical record-keeping and emphasizing preventive care. Obama's plan does not mandate coverage, except for children.
Obama's plan says that employers who don't offer their employees insurance will be required to contribute to the national pool, what McCain calls a "fine." But Obama's plan specifically exempts small businesses from contributing to the pool.
The plan does not define what's a small business and what's not. We can't say for sure whether plumber Joe would be considered a small business under Obama's plan or not.
But generally, Obama does not fine "small businesses." They are specifically exempt. We rate McCain's claim False.
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On the campaign trail, Sen. Barack Obama regularly criticizes President Bush's "failed policies" and leadership abilities. On the floor of the Senate, however, the freshman from Illinois is much less contrary than his rhetoric would suggest.
Responding to Obama's criticisms of Sen. John McCain's 95 percent presidential support score in 2007, McCain's campaign on June 3, 2008, sent a mass e-mail noting that Obama's own presidential support score is higher than one might think.
The e-mail cited vote studies compiled by
Congressional Quarterly
to note that Obama voted to support President Bush's positions between 40 and 50 percent of the time over the past two years. McCain spokesman Brian Rogers also noted that Obama voted with his party more than 95 percent of the time during that period, while McCain was more independent, tallying party unity scores between 70 and 90 percent.
"Can you imagine Obama touting his record of supporting President Bush half the time? Well, it's true by his numbers," Rogers said.
McCain's campaign is correct on both counts. Though Obama is a loyal Democrat who has opposed Bush on legislation more often than the average for his party in the Senate, running for president hasn't made him significantly more partisan. He opposed Bush 51 percent of the time in 2006 and 60 percent of the time in 2007.
In 2007, Obama found himself in Bush's camp on immigration policy; in a series of votes, Obama backed legislation, which failed, that would have provided a temporary guest worker program and new border security measures. Obama and Bush also were allied on legislation that raised the minimum wage to $7.25 per hour over two years and provided $8.3-billion in small-business tax incentives. In 2006, as Obama was laying the foundation for his presidential bid, he supported the president's position on key votes dealing with immigration policy and on making permanent 14 provisions in the "Patriot Act" antiterrorism law.
All of which hardly makes Obama a full-blown Bush supporter. But his record also doesn't put him near the Senate's top 10 Bush foes — a list headed in 2007 by Democrats Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, Barbara Boxer of California, Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, who each were opposed to Bush more than 65 percent of the time. Because Obama has shown a willingness to vote the administration's position on a number of occasions over the past two years, we rule the McCain campaign's claim True.
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Sharpening his attack line that electing Sen. John McCain is the equivalent of giving President Bush a third term, Sen. Barack Obama used his triumphant speech in St. Paul, Minn. June 3, 2008, in which he finally claimed the Democratic nomination, to note that his Republican rival voted with the commander-in-chief 95 percent of the time last year.
"It's not change when John McCain decided to stand with George Bush 95 percent of the time, as he did in the Senate last year," Obama said.
The number Obama cited didn't come out of thin air. It reflects McCain's 2007 "presidential support" score from
Congressional Quarterly,
part of a carefully measured and widely cited series of vote studies that demonstrate how often lawmakers back or oppose the president, as well as the majority of their parties.
But while Obama may be accurately quoting the CQ analysis of 2007, he's selectively picking facts while not telling the entire story.
McCain's 95 percent score was the high-water mark of his presidential support during President Bush's tenure, and was partly a reflection of the new political calculus in the Democratic-controlled Congress. McCain supported Bush as infrequently as 77 percent of the time in 2005, and backed the president's position an average of 89 percent of the time since 2001. By congressional standards, that's solidly partisan, but hardly marching in lockstep.
The 2007 votes reflected the Senate agenda after Democrats gained a one-vote majority in the chamber in the 2006 mid-term elections. Bush stated a position on 97 roll call votes and won 64 of them — a 66 percent success rate. Deduct the 29 Senate votes to confirm Bush nominees to executive branch positions or judgeships, and the president's success rate fell to just over 51 percent.
But while he had a terrible year on paper, Bush was the winner on critical votes on spending limits, taxes and energy policy, thanks to unified support from Republicans. Because Senate rules require 60 votes to end prolonged debate or a filibuster, Republicans repeatedly used the stalling tactic to stop initiatives on the Democrats' agenda. The Senate voted 18 times last year on motions to cut off debate and end filibusters that Bush was on record as supporting. He prevailed 17 times.
McCain missed more than half the votes on which Bush had a position, as he campaigned for the White House. But repeated votes on immigration and the Iraq war — two issues on which he was closely allied with Bush — as well as the filibuster votes helped elevate McCain from one of the president's chief adversaries three years ago to one of his biggest supporters.
McCain's vote score can thus be viewed both as a reflection of ideological kinship with the Bush administration and with the hard-line, tactical decisions he made in response to some Democratic initiatives. Because Obama correctly quotes an accurate measure of how often McCain was in sync with the president in 2007, we rule the claim True.
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In the Republican debate on Jan. 24, 2008, in Boca Raton, Rudy Giuliani was asked a question about global warming. He said he would address the problem in part by supporting alternative fuel sources such as coal.
"We need to expand the use of clean coal," he said. "Carbon sequestration is expensive, but it's a process that works. We have more coal reserves in the United States than they have oil reserves in Saudi Arabia."
Giuiliani's comparison is accurate.
According to the U.S. Energy Department, the United States has 267.3-billion short tons of coal reserves, or 26.8 percent of the world total. Saudi Arabia has about 20 percent of the world's oil reserves.
We find Giuliani's statement True.
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Arguing for his Fair Tax plan — which calls for replacing all income tax with sales tax — Mike Huckabee trotted out a familiar arrow in the quiver of IRS bashers.
"When you include the built-in tax, the embedded tax in the products we buy, that corporations build in, the average American is paying 33 percent in his or her taxes," Huckabee said at the Jan. 24, 2008, Republican debates in Boca Raton. "The average American is working through the month of May just to pay off the government."
In citing the figure, Huckabee stepped squarely into the middle of an annual debate about the burden of taxation on average Americans.
An organization called the Tax Foundation releases a report every year on the projected "Tax Freedom Day," the purported day at which an American pays off federal, local and state taxes.
Tax Freedom Day is calculated by dividing the official government tally of all taxes collected in each year by the official government tally of all income earned in each year.
Last year, that day was April 30 (two days later than in 2006, and five days later than 2000).
According to the Tax Foundation, that means Americans worked for four months, from January 1 to April 30, before they earned enough money to pay their 2007 tax obligations.
Every year, as reliably as the Tax Foundation puts out its Tax Freedom Day press release, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities issues a competing press release that calls the Tax Foundation's numbers highly misleading.
It's the word "average" that irks the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The United States has a progressive tax system, which means people who earn more pay a higher tax rate. Essentially, the wealthy shoulder a larger part of the tax burden.
So while the Tax Foundation reports that Americans paid an average of 18.6 percent of their income in federal taxes in 2004, the Center would like you to consider an average taxpayer, someone in the middle fifth of the income distribution. In 2004, that segment of people paid an average of only 13.9 percent of their income in taxes.
So, the Center would argue, Huckabee's claim that the "average American" works until May to pay off his or her taxes is an exaggeration. The "typical" American, they say, would pay off taxes much sooner.
It's overstated every year, the Center says.
Both sides are right here. The Tax Foundation provides an accurate overall average. And the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities accurately says that figure overstates the impact on an average American.
Bottom line, it's mostly a debate over the term average. Had he said "Americans on average are paying ...," Huckabee would have been on more solid ground than "the average American is paying..." You follow?
We can only give him a Half True.
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At a debate in Boca Raton on Jan. 24, 2008, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee suggested that he was more in touch with how the economy was hurting working people than the other GOP candidates.
He said he was the only candidate at a prior debate — the one on Oct. 9, 2007 — to point out that middle- and lower-income Americans were feeling economic pain.
"A few months ago, when we were all in Dearborn, Mich., your network was the sponsor, with CNBC and MSNBC, and every one of us were asked, 'How's the economy doing?' " Huckabee said during the debate in Boca Raton. "Every one of my colleagues said, 'It's doing great.' And they gave all the numbers. ... The truth is I was the only guy on that stage who said, 'It may be doing great if you're at the top. It's different if you're on the bottom.' "
We find Huckabee's recollections are way off the mark.
He is correct that he indicated some sympathy for working people during the Oct. 9 debate. He plugged his proposal for a national sales tax to help the less fortunate regain their footing.
"The people who handle the bags and make the beds at our hotels and serve the food, many of them are having to work two jobs, and that's barely paying the rent. And you know what else? They don't think that they can afford for their kids to go to college; they're pretty sure they're not going to be able to afford health insurance," he said.
But he is wrong about the comments of his rivals.
Huckabee might have been the biggest pessimist that night, but Ron Paul, John McCain, Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson each noted that Michigan residents were suffering as a result of their state's battered economy.
Paul suggested it was because the nation was living beyond its means while McCain stated the United States was losing industrial jobs and not taking care of those who are left behind.
Others qualified their statements, depicting Michigan as something of an anomaly in an otherwise strong economy. Romney said his birth state was "undergoing a one-state recession." And Thompson said while pockets of the economy were having difficulty, he had no reason to believe the country was heading for a recession.
While Huckabee gets the award for tough-talking realist, he was hardly alone in acknowledging hard times. For that reason, we judge his statement Barely True.
Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.
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At a Republican debate in Boca Raton on Jan. 24, 2008, Rudy Giuliani repeated his claim that Bill Clinton is to blame for shrinking the nation's military.
"I think we should increase the size of our military substantially to overcome the damage that Bill Clinton did with the peace dividend," he said, adding that "a lot of the cause of (the smaller military force) was Bill Clinton's peace dividend, in which he cut the military 25 and 30 percent."
We've covered this topic in two previous items, one for Giuliani and one for a similiar claim made earlier by Mitt Romney. But because this misleading claim is new to many voters who are just tuning into the campaign, we'll reiterate what we've said before.
Romney made his claim in April 2007, saying that, "Following the end of the Cold War, President Clinton began to dismantle our military. He reduced our forces by 500,000. He retired almost 80 ships. Our spending on national defense dropped from over 6 percent of GDP to 3.8 percent today."
The two Republicans are correct that military forces were reduced significantly under Clinton. The active-duty military totaled 1.8-million at the start of his presidency in 1993 and declined to 1.4-million in 2000. They are also correct that the naval fleet shrank dramatically. The Navy had 454 ships in 1993, but as vessels were retired and not replaced, the fleet was down to 341 by 2000.
But they are selectively choosing numbers that make it appear that the military cuts were Clinton's alone. In fact, the cuts were prompted by the end of the Cold War during the presidency of President George H.W. Bush, a Republican.
During Bush's presidency, he and Congress agreed to a sharp drop in military personnel. Active-duty military declined from 2.2-million to 1.8-million. Total defense forces also shrank, from 3.3-million to 2.9-million.
The Republicans are trying to portray Clinton and the Democrats as weak on defense and to make the peace dividend look like a partisan effort. But contrary to the Republicans' claims, the post-Cold War shrinkage of the U.S. military was very much a bipartisan effort. It began under a Republican president and a Democratic Congress and continued under a Democratic president and a Republican Congress.
And so we find, as we did before, that this claim is Half True.
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Pressed on his credentials with GOP voters, John McCain said he won them over in two early primaries.
But he didn't.
Exit polls from the Jan. 19, 2008, primary show he narrowly lost to Mike Huckabee among self-identified Republicans in South Carolina, 32 percent to 31 percent.
And in New Hampshire, exit polls show Mitt Romney beat McCain 35 percent to 34 percent. However, it should be noted that a few news agencies, including MSNBC, showed McCain narrowly winning among Republicans in their results.
The topic is important to McCain because he has often struggled to win over die-hard Republicans. Exit polls show moderate and independent voters powered both of his victories. But when the schedule moves to states like Florida, where primaries are closed to independents, his need for Republican support becomes critical.
The exit polls show that McCain didn't lose among Republicans in either state. When you factor in a margin of error, both are statistical ties. But what McCain said was that he "won the majority" of Republicans in those states, and we don't find any evidence that that's true. We rule McCain's statement False.
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An attack e-mail says the church Barack Obama attends, Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, gave a lifetime award to Louis Farrakhan. Did it?
It may be a small distinction, but the award Farrakhan received came from a magazine connected to the church, not the church itself.
Trumpet Newsmagazine
was founded by the church's senior pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., as a church newsletter. Now it's a nationally distributed lifestyle magazine aimed at socially conscious African-Americans. The magazine gave Farrakhan its Lifetime Achievement "Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. Trumpeter" Award for those who work to "save the lives of Africans on the continent and in the Diaspora."
The magazine interviewed Farrakhan and quoted Wright in the introduction. Here is the entirety of Wright's remarks on Farrakhan:
"When Minister Farrakhan speaks, Black America listens," Wright said. "Everybody may not agree with him, but they listen…His depth on analysis when it comes to the racial ills of this nation is astounding and eye opening. He brings a perspective that is helpful and honest.
"Minister Farrakhan will be remembered as one of the 20th and 21st century giants of the African- American religious experience," Wright said. "His integrity and honesty have secured him a place in history as one of the nation's most powerful critics. His love for Africa and African-American people has made him an unforgettable force, a catalyst for change and a religious leader who is sincere about his faith and his purpose."
It's worth noting that Wright appears to be applauding Farrakhan for his message of black empowerment, a philosophy Wright espouses as well. But the two men have different religions: Farrakhan is a Muslim and Wright is a Christian.
Obama said he did not agree with the award; for more on that, see a related statement
here
.
The magazine award became a campaign issue when
Washington Post
columnist Richard Cohen wrote about the award. To most Americans, Cohen wrote, Farrakhan is racist with a history of making anti-Semitic remarks.
Though the church didn't give the award, the magazine was founded by the church's senior pastor and is closely related. For that reason, we find the statement Mostly True.
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An attack e-mail says the church Barack Obama attends, Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, gave a lifetime award to Louis Farrakhan, and that Obama "remained silent" and wasn't even asked about.
We checked out the award claim and found it to be Mostly True. A magazine closely related to the church gave Farrakhan an award for lifetime achievement. For more on this, see the statement
here
.
But Barack Obama definitely did not remain silent about it. The award received widespread attention after
Washington Post
columnist Richard Cohen wrote about it on Jan. 15, 2008.
Later that day, the campaign released a statement in which Obama himself said:
"I decry racism and anti-Semitism in every form and strongly condemn the anti-Semitic statements made by Minister Farrakhan. I assume that
Trumpet Magazine
made its own decision to honor Farrakhan based on his efforts to rehabilitate ex-offenders, but it is not a decision with which I agree."
Cohen said in his column that he had asked the campaign about the award and received a response from a spokesperson saying Obama did not agree with the award. The blog "Talking Points Memo" said it too asked Obama about Farrakhan and received the statement from Obama rejecting the award. After the statement was released, it was reported in other news outlets as well. For these reasons, we find the e-mail's claims about Obama's response to the award to be False.
UPDATE:
Barack Obama
resigned from Trinity United Church of Christ
on May 31, 2008, after church pastor Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. made controversial remarks about U.S. foreign policy and other matters. Obama said he intends to join another church after the election.
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Mike Huckabee makes the Fair Tax sound lovely. But he's glossing over objections raised by a host of critics who say that the Fair Tax is unfeasible and unworkable.
The Fair Tax would be a sales tax that would replace all income taxes. Legislation to create it, which Huckabee supports, is introduced annually in Congress; the latest version can be found here .
It's true that if the Fair Tax were implemented, people would get all of their paychecks (unless their employers decided to cut wages and keep the tax savings for themselves). Getting all your taxes back certainly sounds like a nice release from pain.
But there are other potentially painful implications down the road that Huckabee sidesteps.
Proponents of the Fair Tax support a 23 percent tax rate that assumes most people would pay the taxes they owe. Economists say that when sales taxes reach that level, the incentive for people to cheat rises. People will try to buy things off the books, and underground economies will develop. To compensate for tax evasion, the tax would have to be raised even higher, which would lead to more evasion.
Abolishing the Internal Revenue Service would exacerbate the problem of compliance, said economist Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C.
"At the end of this story, when you add in some state sales taxes, we could be close to 50 percent." he said.
"Almost all the economists who have looked at proposals for relying exclusively on a sales tax have concluded that it is unworkable because the tax rate would have to be very high."
That sounds kind of ouchy to us.
The transition process could also cause economic disruptions as people across the country stock up on goods before the sales tax takes effect.
"The economy would experience a surge in demand for goods as the switchover date approached and then demand would collapse," wrote David Cay Johnston in his book on tax evasion and enforcement, Perfectly Legal .
A change-over would also negatively impact people who've saved, especially senior citizens. Retirees, who already have paid taxes on their income, will be taxed again on purchases they make from savings they already paid taxes on.
(For a longer discussion of the Fair Tax, read our article on it here .)
Much of the Fair Tax debate depends on what will happen if the country switches from an income-based system to a consumption-based system, a major overhaul of U.S. tax policy that could have significant unintended consequences. To be clear, we're not ruling on what will happen if the Fair Tax is implemented. Rather, we're pointing out that Huckabee's statement blithely glosses over a number of highly credible objections.
It's tempting to give him a pass on his statement as just more overheated campaign rhetoric. But it seems clear to us that such a massive overhaul of the U.S. tax system would not be an end to pain and unfairness "like a magic wand." So we find his statement False.
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Trying to depict Hillary Clinton as a flip-flopper on trade, Barack Obama claimed the New York senator considered the North American Free Trade Agreement a plus for the economy, even though she's recently criticized the pact on the campaign trail.
"I know that Hillary on occasion has said — just last year said this (NAFTA) was a boon to the economy," Obama said during a Jan. 21, 2008, debate in Myrtle Beach, S.C. "I think it has been devastating, because our trade agreements did not have labor standards and environmental standards that would assure that workers in the U.S. were getting a square deal."
Obama's charge is designed to stoke suspicions among liberals and labor leaders that Clinton is in the thrall of big business Democrats who served in her husband's administration, such as former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, chairman of Citigroup Inc., and ex-Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman, her top economic adviser.
Clinton, indeed, energetically promoted NAFTA in the past, thanking corporations for furthering its goals during an address to the 1998 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and adding, "It is certainly clear that we have not by any means finished the job that has begun."
But even before she formally announced her candidacy, Clinton was expressing increased skepticism about globalization and questioning whether other nations were taking advantage of the United States' liberalized trade policies.
The critical tone intensified during the run-up to the Iowa caucuses. During an Oct. 8, 2007, speech in Iowa, she complained that New York apple growers had failed to gain access to Canadian markets while Canadian growers were having no such problems exporting their products to the United States, and blamed the Bush administration for not vigorously enforcing trade agreements.
"I think it is time that we assess trade agreements every five years to make sure they're meeting their goals or make adjustments if they are not and we should start with doing that with NAFTA," Clinton said.
The line attributed to Clinton about NAFTA being a "boon" to the economy appears to be based on an issues rundown in the Sept. 11, 2006, edition of
Newsday
in which the Long Island newspaper, in its own words, stated that Clinton believed the trade agreement to be a boon to the economy. The paper also pointed out that Clinton voted against the Central American-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement in 2005 because of concerns that it would drive jobs overseas.
Since announcing her candidacy, Clinton has, in fact, tried to distance herself from some of the free-trade policies her husband's administration pursued and repeatedly expressed concern and skepticism about the benefits of globalization.
In June 2007, she said NAFTA had some positive effects "but unfortunately it had a lot of downside." And at a debate in December 2007, she announced her intention to review and reform NAFTA if she were elected.
Obama implies Clinton views NAFTA as an unqualified success, but more importantly, he attributes words to her that only appear in a newspaper summary of the issues. We judge his statement to be False.
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At a Democratic debate in Myrtle Beach, S.C., Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton argued about Obama's recent comments about Ronald Reagan (We addressed the Reagan spat with
this item
). As the debate grew heated, Obama portrayed himself as a fighter for Democratic principles and suggested that he was more in touch with working people than she was.
"While I was working on those streets watching those folks see their jobs shift overseas, you were a corporate lawyer sitting on the board at Wal-Mart," Obama said.
Obama is referring to the period from 1985 to 1988 when he was a community organizer in neighborhoods on Chicago's South Side. And he is correct that during that period, many employers in that area — particularly in the steel industry — were closing their plants and moving jobs overseas. U.S. Steel, for example, employed 40,000 people there in the 1970s but shut down operations in the mid 1980s.
Obama is correct about Clinton's tenure on the Wal-Mart board of directors. She was appointed to the board in 1986 when her husband was the governor of Arkansas and she served until 1992. As a board member, Clinton pushed for more women in management and a better environmental program, according to a
New York Times
examination of her work on the board.
At the time, she worked as an attorney for the Rose Law Firm, which had many corporate clients such as Wal-Mart and Tyson Foods. Clinton specialized in patent infringement and intellectual property cases.
We find Obama has his facts straight and his claim is True.
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During a Democratic debate in Myrtle Beach, S.C. on Jan. 21, 2008, John Edwards elaborated on his vision of "two Americas" and showed empathy toward an important bloc of Democratic primary voters by pointing out racial disparities in net worth.
It came during a discussion about whether subprime lenders were targeting the most economically vulnerable people. He said he didn't know their motivations, but added:
"What they have done is targeted the lowest income, most vulnerable families," Edwards said. "And anybody who's paying any attention to what's going on in America today understands, if you are African-American in this country today, you are likely to have a net worth of about 10 percent of what white families have.
"This is not an accident. I mean, we can go put our heads against the wall and pretend that the past never happened, pretend that we didn't live through decades of slavery, followed by decades of segregation, followed by decades of discrimination, which is still going on today."
It appears the former North Carolina senator was relying on figures from the U.S. Census Bureau.
In 2000, the median net worth of a household headed by a non-Hispanic white adult was $79,400. The median net worth of a household run by a black adult was $7,500. The figure for Hispanic households was $9,750. These figures are based on a 2003 report.
Net worth is measured as the total value of a household's financial assets — such as bank accounts, property and vehicles — minus the household's financial liabilities. Though the measurement is an oft-used indicator of financial health, it doesn't always tell the whole story because the amount of income generated by a household's assets is a key factor in maintaining a desired standard of living.
Still, because Edwards correctly cites Census data showing a tenfold disparity between black and white net worth, we judge his statement True.
UPDATE: This corrects our first version, which mistakenly used the term family income when we meant net worth.
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In the TV ad Rudy Giuliani debuted in Florida this week, the announcer makes the claim, "He reformed welfare before others tried."
It's unclear who "others" are — everyone, or just Giuliani's Republican opponents? So let's consider both possibilities.
Giuliani can certainly lay claim to being out front on welfare reform, and his overhaul of the New York City welfare system is nothing short of astounding considering he did it "in the teeth of the most intense opposition" from nearly all of the most significant political forces in the city, said Lawrence Mead, professor of Politics at New York University.
One of the cornerstones of Giuliani's controversial plan was a requirement that able-bodied people work or perform community service in order to receive welfare payments (at its peak in 1999, there were over 35,000 people in the Work Experience Program). Welfare rolls during his two terms as major dropped more than 50 percent.
But Giuliani can't claim New York was the first in the country.
One of the first effective welfare-to-work programs was initiated in San Diego in the early 1980s, Mead said. And Wisconsin instituted an ambitious welfare-to-work program prior to New York City (which is why some people have called former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson, a onetime presidential candidate, the father of welfare reform). In fact, Giuliani hired one of the architects of the Wisconsin plan to help create changes in New York City.
"Giuliani was not absolutely first," said Mead, author of
Government Matters: Welfare Reform in Wisconsin.
"There is a long history of gradual movement to more and more radical reform," said Ron Haskins, a senior fellow of economic studies at the Brookings Institution and author of the book
Welfare Over Work.
Politicians in lots of states had dabbled in welfare reform before Giuliani, Haskins said, but Giuliani's program may have been the most remarkable due to the political opposition.
Both Mead and Haskins say that if the ad was comparing Giuliani just to his Republican opponents, it's right. Giuliani began making changes shortly after being elected mayor, so 1994. That predates the governorships of Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney. As for Sens. John McCain and Fred Thompson, the federal welfare reform laws passed in August 1996.
But the ad doesn't narrow the field at all, so we can only deduce it means he reformed welfare before
everyone
else. And that is False.
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In the final presidential debate, Barack Obama attacked John McCain's health care policy as a net loss for workers.
He was referring to a McCain proposal to repeal the traditional exemption on employer-provided insurance in exchange for a tax credit that will encourage workers to seek their own insurance. The credit would be $2,500 per person, or $5,000 for couples.
In the debate, Obama got some things right about McCain's policy. Critics of McCain's policy do indeed worry that it will discourage employers from offering health care without lowering premiums for everyone.
But Obama oversimplified drastically when he said, "By the way, the average policy costs about $12,000. So if you've got $5,000 and it's going to cost you $12,000, that's a loss for you."
To explain why this statement is problematic, let's get into more details about McCain's policy.
Most Americans who have health insurance, about 71 percent, get it through their employer. Usually, the premiums are split so that the employer pays part and the employee pays part. Typically, the employer pays at least half, and often more.
Strictly speaking, the part that the employer pays is considered compensation and workers would owe taxes on it if there wasn't a tax exemption in federal law. The exemption makes employer-provided health insurance more attractive to both workers and employers.
McCain wants to encourage greater competition for health insurance as a way to reduce premiums. His idea is that people should be able to go out on the open market and buy their own health insurance, and not be pushed into an employer-provided insurance plan by tax incentives.
So under McCain's plan, the tax exemption for employer-provided health insurance would disappear, and people would get a tax credit to spend on any health insurance they wish. They might choose to use their employer's plan and use the tax credit to offset the new tax on the benefit, or they might go off and buy insurance on their own.
It's a complex switcheroo, but there's ample evidence to show that the plan would be a wash for most workers. Keep in mind the current benefit is not worth $12,000, which is the cost of the average family plan; the benefit is
the taxes
on the part of that $12,000 that the employer pays. So if the employer picks up $8,000 of a $12,000 policy, the current benefit is the
taxes a worker would pay
on $8,000.
The McCain campaign says only workers with "gold-plated" health programs would do worse with the new credit. An independent analysis from the nonpartisan Urban Institute confirms that: "In general, lower-income people with health insurance would receive benefits from the credit that would be well in excess of the value that they receive from today’s tax exemption. The gains are much smaller for higher-income people."
Obama's numbers are wrong. McCain's health plan does not replace a $12,000 policy with a $5,000 credit. It replaces
the taxes on part of that amount
with a tax credit. We rate Obama's statement False.
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Barack Obama defended his health care plan during a debate in Nashville, Tenn., on Oct. 7, 2008. His opponents have attacked his plan as "government-run" health care.
"No. 1, let me just repeat, if you've got a health care plan that you like, you can keep it," Obama said. "All I'm going to do is help you to lower the premiums on it. You'll still have choice of doctor."
Obama is accurately describing his health care plan here. He advocates a program that seeks to build on the current system, rather than dismantling it and starting over.
Obama's plan essentially takes today's system and seeks to expand it to the uninsured. It creates national pools for individuals to buy their own cheaper insurance. It increases eligibility for the poor and children to enroll in initiatives like Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program. And it has several strategies to rein in costs for everyone, such as streamlining medical record-keeping and emphasizing preventive care.
Obama has said he would like his plan to be universal, in that everyone has health care coverage. But currently it includes a mandate only for children. Obama has said that he did not include a mandate for adults so as not to penalize people with modest incomes.
It remains to be seen whether Obama's plan will actually be able to achieve the cost savings it promises for the health care system. But people who want to keep their current insurance should be able to do that under Obama's plan. His description of his plan is accurate, and we rate his statement True.
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Candidates often try to place their proposals in the best possible light. But John McCain went a step too far in saying at a debate in Nashville on Oct. 7, 2008, that he wants to give "every American a $5,000 refundable tax credit."
It's actually half that: $2,500 for singles and $5,000 for couples.
The tax credit is part of McCain's health proposal, which seeks to increase competition for health care by reducing reliance on employer-provided health insurance.
Most Americans who have health insurance get it through their employer. Usually, the premiums are split so that the employer pays part and the employee pays part. Strictly speaking, the part that the employer pays is compensation, and workers would owe taxes on it if there wasn't a tax exemption in federal law. The exemption makes employer-provided health insurance more attractive to both workers and employers.
McCain's idea is that people should be able to go out on the open market and buy their own health insurance, and not be pushed into an employer-provided insurance plan by tax incentives. So under McCain's plan, the tax exemption for employer-provided health insurance would disappear, and people would get a tax credit to spend on any health insurance they wish. They might choose to use their employer's plan and use the tax credit to offset the new tax on the benefit, or they might go off and buy insurance on their own.
Another caveat about McCain's tax credit: You can't get cash for it. To ensure that it goes to health care, the credit is payable directly to insurance companies. Any remainder would go into a special health spending account.
We've seen Barack Obama talk about a $1,000 tax cut for working families, when it's actually a $500 per person tax credit. McCain would be accurate if he had said $5,000 per family, but his statement in the debate takes things too far. It's $2,500 for single people. We rate his statement Half True.
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A chain e-mail about Michelle Obama purports to be excerpts from a senior thesis she wrote while at Princeton University.
It's true that Obama, then Michelle Robinson, attended Princeton and wrote a thesis titled "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community."
In Obama's thesis, she sought to quantify how the attitudes of black Princeton alumni changed after graduation in regard to race relations and social change. Obama was especially interested in the attitudes of Princeton alumni in regard to improving the lives of lower-income blacks.
To document the change in attitudes, Obama devised an 18-question survey and mailed it to black alumni. Her thesis is a discussion of her methodology and an analysis of the results. It contains a limited amount of personal opinion in the introduction.
But the thesis did not say that the United States was founded on "crime and hatred" and that whites in America are "ineradicably racist." This appears to be a complete fabrication.
The thesis is available on the Internet;
the politics news site Politico reported on it in February 2008 and posted a copy it had obtained from Princeton University
.
We downloaded a copy, which appears to be complete with no numbered pages missing. We read it, but we did not find the phrases the e-mail describes.
We took the additional step of scanning the document through optical character recognition software so we could search its text electronically. An automated search did not find the words "crime," "hatred," "hate," "ineradicably," or "racist" in the document.
The e-mail goes on to list some accurate quotes from the thesis, but its initial accusations are fiction. The words "crime and hatred" and "ineradicably racist" are inventions of whoever penned the e-mail, not words that appeared in Obama's thesis. Because of that fabrication and the e-mail's intention to defame the Obamas, we rate this claim Pants on Fire!
For more about this chain e-mail, read our story Digging up dirt on Michelle Obama
.
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Sen. John McCain, seeking to back up his claim that Sen. Barack Obama is inexperienced on national security matters, said at a town hall meeting in Nevada that his opponent had been to Iraq only once.
"The security of this nation and its future security against the threats and the challenge of radical Islamic extremism, is transcendent," McCain told a crowd in Reno on May 28, 2008. "It's always transcendent to every president, all throughout our nation's history. And so Sen. Obama and I have a strong disagreement on this issue. And Sen. Obama has been to Iraq once."
News accounts confirm, and the Obama campaign did not dispute, that the senator has indeed traveled to Iraq just one time during the war, in January 2006. He traveled with Sens. Christopher "Kit" Bond, R-Mo.; Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind.; and Rep. Harold Ford Jr., D-Tenn.; and met with U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, American intelligence and reconstruction specialists and Iraqi election officials, according to news accounts from the time.
He also played basketball with troops in Kuwait. And in a phone call with reporters back home, he reaffirmed his skepticism about the war effort. "There is not going to be a military solution here in Iraq," Obama told the
Chicago Sun-Times
at the time. He said it was time to "start phasing down troops" and "to give the Iraqis more ownership."
McCain has been to Iraq eight times. One can argue about the significance of the disparity, but not about the numbers. We rule McCain's claim True.
Read our Fact Sheet on which candidates have been to Iraq and what their position on the war is.
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In an attempt to wrest the moral high ground on special interest influence, Sen. Barack Obama has gone on the offensive, accusing Republican Sen. John McCain of talking tough on campaign finance reform, but then stocking his campaign with lobbyists.
At a rally in Tampa on May 21, 2008, Obama said that despite 10 years ago proposing a bill that would have banned lobbyists from being paid by a campaign, McCain "hired some of the biggest lobbyists in Washington to run his campaign."
The McCain campaign's ties to current or former lobbyists has been well documented in recent weeks. Disclosures about some of those ties — including clients they have served — led to a handful of departures from the campaign. The highest profile casualty was former Rep. Thomas Loeffler, campaign co-chairman and national finance committee co-chairman. Loeffler is a lobbyist and founder of the Loeffler Group, a multimillion-dollar lobbying operation that, according to
Houston Chronicle
reports last year, has included clients such as AT&T, the National Association of Broadcasters, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the Port of Houston, Southwest Airlines and Toyota Motor Co. The firm also has represented the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia on trade issues.
In response, the McCain campaign on May 15, 2008, instituted a "conflict policy" — the campaign will not keep any federal lobbyists on its payroll. Period.
"We are in compliance with that policy," McCain campaign spokesman Brian Rogers told PolitiFact.
But the campaign is still thick with former lobbyists, some who left or took unpaid leave of absences from their lobbying firms just before joining the campaign.
One of them is Charlie Black, a senior adviser on the McCain campaign. Described by the
Washington Post
as a "longtime uber lobbyist," Black retired as chairman of BKSH & Associates in March. He told the
New York Times
he is not paid by the campaign.
Then there's campaign manager Rick Davis, who hasn't been a registered lobbyist for five years and took a leave of absence from his lobbying firm Davis Manafort two years ago.
Black defended the use of former lobbyists.
"I think you can change professions and unless you did something unethical or criminal, your past profession should not be injected into the candidate's campaign," Black told the
New York Times.
"It's absurd."
Said Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for the McCain campaign: "John McCain has an unmatched record of fighting the influence of special interests in Washington. The McCain campaign has implemented the strictest policy against lobbyists in presidential campaign history, and we challenge Sen. Obama to meet our standard."
Okay, so McCain has clearly set a policy that forbids current federal lobbyists from drawing a campaign paycheck and campaign officials say they are in full compliance with that. Now. But the policy comes more than a year into the campaign. Current lobbyists hired by the campaign may have now been purged, but the fact is they were hired.
We rule Obama's statement True.
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In a speech before 15,000 people in Tampa on May 21, 2008, Sen. Barack Obama said that it was time to get away from "special interest-dominated politics in Washington." He criticized Sen. John McCain for hiring some of the biggest lobbyists in Washington to run his presidential campaign.
"And when called on it," Obama said, "his top lobbyist actually had the nerve to say, 'The American people won't care about this.' I think the American people do care about it."
Obama didn't say who he was talking about, and his campaign did not respond to clarify.
But we think Obama was referring to comments McCain campaign senior adviser Charlie Black made aboard McCain's campaign plane on May 19.
Several days prior, the McCain campaign had issued a "conflict policy," which prohibits anyone paid to work for the campaign from being a registered lobbyist. Unpaid volunteers can be lobbyists, but they must list their clients and can't serve on policy committees that deal with issues in which those clients may have an interest.
The policy came on the heels of the departure of several high-level campaign officials after embarrassing disclosures about their current or former lobbying activities.
Black is himself a former lobbyist (the
Washington Post
described him as "longtime uber lobbyist"), but he retired from his lobbying firm in March to work full time for the campaign.
According to accounts from NBC News and the
New York Times,
as reporters peppered Black with questions about the debate over former lobbyists working for the campaign, Black responded, "This is complete inside-the-Beltway nonsense."
NBC News' Carrie Dann recounted the interview with Black as follows:
"Asked today if questions about potential conflicts of interest might be affecting the choices of average American voters, Black responded bluntly: "Hell, no." He was careful to say that Sen. McCain is committed to maintaining the integrity of the campaign — hence his commitment to the re-vetting process. But, Black added, 'I do not believe that average voters out there care.'"
Sure sounds like Black was saying he doesn't think the American people care about this issue. We rate Obama's statement True.
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Special interests and lobbyists are perennial topics for political campaigns, and Sen. Barack Obama has made them a repeated target in his attacks on Sen. John McCain.
"Ten years ago, John McCain offered a bill that said he would ban a candidate from paying registered lobbyists," Obama said. "He did this because he said that having lobbyists on your campaign was a conflict of interest. This is what he said 10 years ago. Well, I'll tell you John McCain then would be pretty disappointed with John McCain now, because he hired some of the biggest lobbyists in Washington to run his campaign. And when he was called on it, his top lobbyist had the nerve to say that the American people won't care about this."
(We checked the statement about McCain hiring "some of the biggest lobbyists in Washington to run his campaign" and
ruled it True.
Also,
we ruled it True
that McCain's top lobbyist did have "the nerve to say that the American people won't care about this.")
We delved into legislative history and found that McCain did introduce a bill, in 1996 and again in 1997, to ban lobbyists from being paid by political campaigns. The Lobbying Conflict of Interest Elimination Act said that "a candidate and the candidate's authorized committees shall not make disbursements for any services rendered by any individual during any period if such individual was required to register for such period as a lobbyist."
McCain made remarks recorded in the Congressional Record about the bill on Jan. 22, 1997: "Registered lobbyists who work for campaigns as fundraisers clearly represent a conflict of interest. When a campaign employs an individual who also lobbies that member, the perception of undue and unfair influence is raised. This legislation would stop such practices."
The bill never made it out of committee.
It was part of a flurry of campaign finance reform legislation proposed in the aftermath of the 1996 campaign for president, during which Bill Clinton raised large amounts of "soft money," the unregulated gifts to political parties from individuals, corporations and unions. At least 57 pieces of legislation were filed in the spring of 1997, according to news reports from the time.
One of those pieces of legislation included comprehensive reform banning soft money, sponsored by McCain and Sen. Russ Feingold, a Democrat from Wisconsin. The McCain-Feingold bill didn't succeed that year, but in 2002 it did pass and was signed into law by President Bush as the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act. Though considered landmark legislation, it did not address lobbyists working for campaigns.
Obama's description of McCain's legislation from a decade ago is accurate. We rule his statement True. For more on the other aspects of Obama's attack,
see our story here.
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One of the common themes from supporters of the Democratic health plan is that the United States spends too much on health care and gets too little in return. But in a recent interview, Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with the Democratic majority, stretched the evidence too far.
On the Aug. 19, 2009,
Rachel Maddow Show
on MSNBC, Sanders responded to a question about corporate interests' role in the health care reform debate by saying, "We spend twice as much per capita on health care as any other nation on Earth. And there is a reason why the insurance companies, year after year, make huge profits and pay their CEOs tens and tens of millions of dollars in compensation salaries. And the reason for that is that these guys exert enormous influence over the political process in Washington."
With this item, we'll address his international comparisons on health spending.
We looked at two widely used sources of international health care comparisons — statistics from the World Health Organization, the public health arm of the United Nations, and from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group that represents 30 wealthier, industrialized countries, most of them in Europe and North America. We also confirmed with three international health care experts that these were the best statistics available.
According to the 2009 edition of WHO's
World Health Statistics
report, which uses figures from 2006, health care spending in the United States — both public- and private-sector — amounted to $6,719 per capita. Ranking next were Luxembourg and Monaco at $6,506 and $6,353 per capita, respectively. All told, either 11 or 15 countries told the WHO they spent more than $3,360 per capita, the point at which the United States no longer doubles their spending. (We provide two possible figures here because the WHO offers both raw figures and statistics adjusted for currency valuations.) The other nations that rank near the top with the United States include Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, in addition to tiny Malta and San Marino.
The OECD's numbers tell a similar story. In 2007, the OECD said that the United States spent $7,290 per capita on health care, ranking it first among the 30 countries studied. Five other nations spent more than $3,645 per capita, the point at which the United States no longer doubles their spending. The highest is the Netherlands at $4,417. The other four were Austria, Canada, Norway and Switzerland.
Sanders would have been on completely firm ground had he simply said, "We spend
more
per capita on health care than any other nation on Earth." But instead he said "twice as much." And for that reason we rate his statement False.
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Responding to Sen. Barack Obama's assertions that he is shortchanging veterans by opposing a Democratic plan to expand education aid, Sen. John McCain's camp is depicting the Illinois senator as a lawmaker who has already voted against a key war funding measure that would have improved health services for veterans.
On May 12, 2008, McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds singled out Obama's May 24, 2007 vote against a fiscal 2007 emergency war spending measure to support ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying it violated Obama's oft-stated dictum that it would be irresponsible to vote against funding troops in the field.
"It is absurd for Barack Obama to question John McCain's commitment to America's veterans when Obama himself voted against our nation's veterans and troops in the field during a time of war," Bounds said.
The McCain campaign went on to release a factually accurate breakdown of nearly $1.8-billion worth of veterans health funding provisions in the $120-billion bill, including $595-million for medical facilities, $326-million of construction funding for Veterans Administration-identified needs, $250-million for administration of the VA health system and separate line items for mental health services, counseling, trauma support teams, prosthetics and rehabilitation programs.
It's important to note that Obama didn't explicitly oppose any of this spending. Rather, he got involved in a contentious battle over whether to include language in the bill that would set a timetable for combat troop withdrawals from Iraq. Democratic leaders in the House and Senate initially viewed the addition of this condition as an effective way of challenging the Bush administration's war policies. But they soon backed down in the face of staunch GOP opposition, worried that they would be accused of delaying needed aid to troops in the field by not sending Bush a bill he could sign quickly.
On May 2, Bush vetoed an earlier spending draft that contained timetables for troop withdrawals, saying it "infringes upon the powers vested in the Presidency by the Constitution."
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said Democrats could try again when Congress took up a fiscal 2008 defense authorization bill. But Obama and 13 other holdouts (in all, 10 Democrats, three Republicans and one independent) registered their displeasure with a "clean" funding bill that didn't address troop withdrawals by voting against the measure. "We should not give the president a blank check to continue down this same, disastrous path," Obama said in a statement on the day of the vote.
Obama has, in fact, shown an interest in improving military benefits, working in the spring of 2005 to insert language in a defense authorization bill reversing a policy that required soldiers receiving outpatient care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center to pay for meals.
Through his proxies, McCain fails to put Obama's vote in the proper context, so we cannot rate this statement True. Still, even though Obama had his reasons, the fact remains that he voted against the bill, which leads us to conclude that McCain's statement is Mostly True.
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Facing long odds in her quest to win the Democratic nomination, Sen. Hillary Clinton has been making the case that she would be a stronger candidate in the general election because she has won primaries and caucuses in important states.
"The White House is won in the swing states, and I am winning the swing states," she said in a speech in Charleston, W.Va. on May 13, 2008, after she defeated Sen. Barack Obama in the West Virginia primary.
Clinton is right that a handful of swing states are crucial to winning the general election, but her math doesn't add up.
First, a caveat: Just because a candidate wins a primary in a given state does not mean the candidate has an upper hand in that state in the general election.
"That's the most important fact here," said Amy Walter, editor of
National Journal's
"Hotline," a political Web site. "Primary success in a state is no indicator of future success."
That's because primary elections are very different than general elections. Primary voters tend to be more partisan and more active in politics, so candidates adapt their messages to appeal to them. In a general election, the candidates can usually depend on support from their own party, so they focus more on moderates and independents.
Also, many states lean toward one party, so a victory or loss in a primary does not indicate how the state will go in November. For example, Obama lost Massachusetts to Clinton. Yet if he is the nominee, he is a strong favorite because Massachusetts has voted Democratic in every presidential election since 1984.
Still, Clinton argues that she is more popular with core Democrats, the white working-class voters who she says will be the party's base in the swing states. So let's examine whether she has indeed won more of those states.
Pundits and campaign strategists generally agree that there are about 14 battleground states -- Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon and Washington. For our purposes, we'll examine all except Michigan because Obama was not on the primary ballot there. But it's also important to point out that the candidates agreed not to campaign in Florida, and some Democrats don't consider the Florida results a valid measurement of Obama's strength in the state.
Clinton has won the primaries or caucuses in six of them -- Florida, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Ohio, New Mexico and Nevada. Obama has also won six -- Virginia, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Colorado and Washington. And he's favored to win Oregon's primary on May 20.
So to recap the score:
Clinton 6, Obama 6 (plus Oregon if he wins as expected).
That doesn't sound like she's "winning" the swing states. She's exaggerating her strength in those states, so we find her statement to be Barely True.
Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.
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Setting the table for her resounding victory in West Virginia's primary, Sen. Hillary Clinton pumped up the state's role in the presidential election at a campaign stop in Logan.
"If West Virginia had voted for our Democratic nominee in 2000 and 2004, we wouldn't have had to put up with George Bush for the last 7 years," she said May 12, 2008, as reported by MSNBC.com's "First Read" blog. "I am going to work as hard as I can between now and the time the polls close tomorrow, because I want to earn your support."
Really? Five electoral college votes from a state of nearly 2-million people could have prevented the George W. Bush administration? Here we thought it was 537 popular votes in Florida.
Turns out, Clinton is half right.
In the bitterly contested election of 2000, Bush won the state of West Virginia with 336,475 votes to Vice President Al Gore's 295,497. That earned Bush 5 electoral college votes.
Now, Bush won the electoral college — and the presidency — 271-266. Funny how that's a 5-vote difference. If you subtract 5 electoral college votes from Bush's total, and add 5 electoral college votes to Gore's total, indeed the result is flipped, 271-266, in Gore's favor. And the world embraces the climate change crisis years earlier.
(Of course, many would argue a more significant factor was Florida's 27 electoral votes — in dispute until Dec. 12, 2000, when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Bush, saying it was too late for another recount.)
The 2004 election is another matter completely. On the simple question of the math, Clinton is wrong. Bush defeated Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, 286-251 in the electoral college. West Virginia's 5 votes wouldn't have put a dent in Bush's 35-vote margin.
But there's something incongruous about Clinton extending her argument to include the 2004 election. If Gore had won in 2000, then Bush almost certainly wouldn't have been running against Kerry in 2004 and who knows what the electoral map would have looked like in a Gore re-election race.
Clinton is right that Bush wouldn't be president if West Virginia had gone for Gore in 2000. That alone would have prevented 7 years of a Bush administration.
By raising the 2004 election, though, Clinton ruins her perfectly accurate argument. Suggesting that West Virginia voters had the same chance to defeat Bush in 2004 that they had in 2000 is just wrong, which is how we end up at Half True.
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The White House is fighting chain e-mails with chain e-mails.
After spending days responding to inaccurate e-mails about the health care reform plan, the White House responded with its own e-mail from David Axelrod, senior adviser to President Barack Obama. The subject line was "Something worth forwarding."
Axelrod began his e-mail with a list of ways that reform provides "security and stability to those with or without coverage."
One of his claims is that refom "ends exorbitant out-of-pocket expenses, deductibles or co-pays: Insurance companies will have to abide by yearly caps on how much they can charge for out-of-pocket expenses."
We recognize that "exorbitant" is subjective, but we thought it would be helpful to research whether Axelrod is right that the plan limits charges that a typical person or family would find excessive.
The main health care reform bill in Congress does set annual limits on out-of-pocket expenses. That means there's a cap on what people would have to pay in a year for medical costs. And insurance companies won't be allowed to require patients to pay for preventive treatments such as check-ups.
In the House legislation, outlined in section 122, the annual cap on out-of-pocket expenses is $5,000 for an individual and $10,000 for a family. Those numbers are indexed for inflation.
The policy would be phased in. Employer-provided policies would have a grace period of five years, as outlined in section 102, before they are required to comply with the caps. If you get a new individual policy through the health care exchange, it would have to comply right away.
We asked Sara Collins of the Commonwealth Fund about the caps. The Commonwealth Fund is a nonpartisan private foundation that advocates for a better health care system. She said the caps are a good form of consumer protection.
Axelrod is correct that the main health care reform bill requires insurance companies to "abide by yearly caps on how much they can charge for out-of-pocket expenses." But ending "exorbitant" out-of-pocket expenses, deductibles or co-pays? 'Exorbitant' may be in the eye of the beholder. For a family, $10,000 in the course of a year can be a serious financial hit. (The median income for a family of four is $67,000.) Still, the new limits are better than nothing, and health care advocates praise them as an important safeguard for consumers. So we rate Axelrod's statement Mostly True.
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During a town hall meeting in Portsmouth, N.H., on Aug. 11, 2009, an audience member asked President Barack Obama why members of Congress have a different health care plan than the rest of us.
"Why have you not used the bully pulpit to chastise Congress for having two systems of health care, one for all of us and one for them," an audience member asked.
Obama answered that lawmakers get a good deal on health care, but that "their deal is no better than the janitor that cleans their offices because they are part of a federal employee plan. It is a huge pool. You've got millions of people who are part of the pool which means they have enormous leverage with the insurance companies. ... That drives down their costs, and they get a better deal."
Republican critics of the president's plan have made an issue of coverage for members of Congress, saying that lawmakers should be forced to take the public option, the most basic government-run plan under Obama's proposal. We found Newt Gingrich was largely
correct
that Democrats have voted against that idea.
The administration has studied the federal benefits program, which gets high marks for efficiency, to get ideas for its own health care proposal.
Obama's description of the federal plan is accurate. Under the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, federal employees and elected officials can choose from an array of plans, ranging from very basic options that have high deductibles and only carry catastrophic coverage to more expensive coverage that is more comprehensive. It is the largest employer-sponsored program in the world, covering over 9 million employees, retirees, former employees, family members and former spouses, according to the Office of Personnel Management's Web site.
People who opt for the same package will get the same treatment, said Michael Ornstein, a spokesman for the Office of Personnel Management.
"The benefits, co-pays and deductibles are no different whether you are a career employee like myself or an elected official," he said.
For the most part, janitorial staff on Capitol Hill are federal employees, said Eva Malecki, communications officer for the Architect of the Capitol, the office involved in the day-to-day operations of the Capitol complex.
"We do have a few contract workers," she said. "But the majority are federal employees and are therefore covered by the federal employee benefits program. The custodial staff has access to the same benefits as members of Congress."
We should note that while janitors and members of Congress can choose from the same menu of plans, members of Congress generally have more money to spend on, well, anything. Many members of Congress are millionaires.
But Obama is right that lawmakers and janitors are eligible for the same benefits, deductibles and co-pays. We rate his statement True.
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When candidates debate in Nevada, you can bet Yucca Mountain will be mentioned. And Hillary Clinton had her facts in order during a Jan. 15, 2008, debate in Las Vegas.
Yucca Mountain is the proposed site for a controversial proposal to store much of the nation's nuclear waste in one place. Predictably, most Nevadans oppose this. The original opening date for the site was in 1998, but opposition has prevented the project from going forward and its fate is unclear.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., is a powerful opponent. Both Clinton and Obama have urged that the project be shelved.
A prominent supporter of Yucca Mountain, though, is Exelon Corp., an electric utility based in Chicago.
Exelon operates the largest nuclear fleet (17 reactors) in the United States and the third-largest commercial nuclear fleet in the world, according to Exelon's Web site.
In a speech to nuclear energy executives in May 2007, Exelon CEO John Rowe said permanent disposal at Yucca Mountain or a similar facility remains "a long-term imperative" for the industry, even while he acknowledged it would not happen soon.
We asked a spokesman for Exelon if they've spent "millions" promoting Yucca Mountain. We were told they don't track their spending by project. Public records, though, indicate the company has spent more than $10-million on lobbyists between 2002 and 2007, with Yucca Mountain listed among its top issues. That doesn't count previous years; the Yucca Mountain project has been debated for more than 20 years.
Meanwhile, campaign finance records confirm Exelon is one of Obama's top contributors. The Center for Responsive Politics found that Exelon employees were his sixth-largest corporate donor group. (No. 1 was Goldman Sachs.)
The Obama campaign points to several mitigating factors: Obama opposes Yucca Mountain. Exelon is one of the largest companies and employers in Obama's hometown of Chicago. Obama has sponsored legislation specifically targeting Exelon after unplanned waste releases in Illinois. Obama has not accepted any money from Exelon lobbyists or Exelon's political action committee; rather, the contributions are from people who work at Exelon.
Of all these points, it's the last we find most compelling. Obama is not taking money from Exelon as a corporate entity or PAC, rather he's accepting contributions from Exelon executives and employees. (Clinton, by contrast, accepts federal PAC money, though she hasn't accepted any from Exelon.) It's a small but real difference, so we rate her claim on Obama's ties to Exelon to be Mostly True.
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During the Democratic debate in Las Vegas on Jan. 15, 2008, Sen. Barack Obama complained about "callousness" for wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
"I went to Walter Reed to talk to the wounded warriors who had come back to discover that they were still paying for their meals and their phone calls while in Walter Reed, while rehabbing, which I could not believe," Obama said, referring to his April 2005 visit to the Washington, D.C., hospital. "And I was able to gain the cooperation of a Republican-controlled Senate at the time and pass a bill that would eliminate that."
Obama is correct that his bill passed, but he gives the impression its scope was broader than it really was.
It was actually Beverly Young, the wife of U.S. Rep. C.W. Bill Young of Indian Shores, Fla., who two years earlier called attention to the meal rules at Walter Reed. In the summer of 2003, she learned that the government was requiring wounded soldiers who were staying in the hospital to reimburse the government $8.10 per day for their food. The rule was based on a philosophy that soldiers would be double-dipping if they ate food at the hospital and got to pocket the $8.10.
She and Rep. Young raised a fuss about the rule and said it was wrong to charge wounded soldiers for hospital food. Rep. Young said it was especially silly to charge because "the food probably isn't that good."
The Youngs paid a $210 bill on behalf of Marine Staff Sgt. Bill Murwin, the first case the Youngs heard about, and Rep. Young introduced a bill to permanently end the rule. It passed in October 2003.
Young's law applied to inpatient care at Walter Reed. In January 2005, the month that Obama joined the Senate, Salon.com published an article that said soldiers who were visiting Walter Reed for outpatient care were also being required to pay for their meals.
About four months later, Obama visited Walter Reed and then introduced an amendment to a defense bill that expanded the definition of "hospitalized" soldiers to include those undergoing medical recuperation and therapy. Obama noted that the number of soldiers affected was "small" — about 4,000.
His amendment passed the Senate in May 2005 with bipartisan support: Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., was one of the co-sponsors and it passed when Republicans controlled Congress. The meal portion was included in a final conference report that passed both chambers that month.
Obama is correct that his bill passed and that it had Republican support. But at the Las Vegas debate, he gave the impression that its scope was broader than it was. Indeed, the main problem had been fixed two years earlier. So we find his statement Half True.
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Hillary Clinton may want some of the comments she made in Vegas to stay in Vegas.
During a televised MSNBC debate, the New York senator, who voted against the Energy Policy Act of 2005, called the law a "Dick Cheney lobbyist energy bill" that gave enormous tax breaks to the oil and gas industry. As president, Clinton said she would invest $50-billion in clean, renewable energy.
"So that 2005 energy bill was a big step backwards on the path to clean, renewable energy," said Clinton. "That's why I voted against it. That's why I'm standing for the proposition — let's take away the giveaways that were given to gas and oil, put them to work on solar and wind and geothermal and biofuels and all of the rest that we need for a new energy future."
Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, who voted for the bill in 2005, had a different view.
"Well, the reason I voted for it was because it was the single largest investment in clean energy — solar, wind, biodiesel — that we had ever seen," Obama said.
While the Energy Policy Act of 2005 did give the oil and gas industry tax breaks and incentives to boost production, the law also mandated 7.5-billion gallons of ethanol and other biofuels to be blended into gasoline by 2012 — the largest such mandate ever enacted and one widely credited with sparking an ethanol plant construction boom across the Midwest. The law also funneled hundreds of millions of dollars toward biomass research and the production of biofuels derived from the leaves, stems and stalks of a plant rather than corn kernels used to make ethanol.
"It obviously wasn't (a step backward)," said Matt Hartwig, spokesman for the Renewable Fuels Association. "It created a meaningful market for renewable fuels like ethanol and biodiesel."
Clinton's comments are particularly interesting given that she returned to Washington from the campaign trail last month to vote for the passage of the Energy Independence and Security Act. The 2007 energy law raises fuel economy standards for the first time in 32 years and requires production of billions of gallons more ethanol and biofuel.
But Senate Democrats, facing a veto threat from the White House and opposition from oil-state lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, did not succeed in rolling back oil and gas industry tax breaks to pay for $21.5-billion in incentives for alternative energies such as solar and wind. Obama voted for the bill, too.
Rolling back tax breaks for the oil and gas industry in this Congress, and with this administration, is as likely as winning big in Vegas. Clinton's best chance will come if and when she moves into the Oval Office. And despite being right when it comes to the 2005 Energy Policy Act's treatment of the oil and gas industry, we find her assessment of its impact on renewable energy False.
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Barack Obama said in a debate that he has raised the most money from small donors.
For this question, we turned to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research group that tracks money in politics.
The center found that, based on available data, Obama has raised the most money from small donors, said spokesman Massie Ritsch.
Small donors are defined as people who donate less than $200; the Federal Election Commission requires candidates to itemize contributions from people who give more than that. Smaller donations get reported as a lump sum, and Obama has reported the most money raised under this category. (The donation limit for any individual donor is $2,300 per candidate.)
An important caveat: The center has only analyzed data compiled through Sept. 30, 2007, the last deadline for campaign finance data. Another report is due about two weeks from this writing, on Jan. 31, 2008. It's possible, though not likely, that fundraising during the last quarter of the year could change this analysis.
Here are the totals for individual donors calculated by the center so far, excluding PAC contributions and transfers from other accounts:
* Obama: $79.2-million total, $19.8-million small;
* Clinton: $79.6-million total, $10.4-million small;
* Edwards $30.1-million total, $8.4-million small.
Based on the center's analysis, we find Barack Obama's claim that he gets the most money from small donors to be True.
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To highlight the different approaches between Democrats and Republicans on keeping troops in Iraq, Sen. Hillary Clinton pointed to remarks Sen. John McCain made in the days before the New Hampshire primary that indicated his support for a prolonged military commitment in the region. Clinton has said that, if elected, one of her first official actions would be to direct military leaders to draft a viable plan to begin a phased withdrawal within 60 days. Her goal is to have most troops out of Iraq by the end of 2013.
Clinton's account of McCain's position rings true. The Arizona senator was an enthusiastic supporter of President Bush's surge and opposes a timetable for troop withdrawal. He was somewhat glib about the issue during a Jan. 3, 2008, town hall meeting in Derry, N.H. When a voter asking a question made the point that President Bush raised the possibility American troops would be in Iraq for 50 years, McCain interrupted by saying, "maybe 100."
McCain went on to note the United States has maintained a military presence for decades in such places as Japan and South Korea. He said he supported such a commitment in a global hot spot like Iraq where al-Qaida continues to wield influence and recruit followers — as long as there aren't American casualties.
McCain expanded on those thoughts three days later during an appearance on NBC's
Meet the Press,
asserting that most Americans share his views. "We have a base in Turkey. We have a base in Japan, Germany. We've had bases there. It's not American presence that bothers the American people, it's American casualties," McCain said. "And if Americans are safe wherever they are in the world, Americans — the American people don't mind that. So what I believe we can achieve is a reduction in casualties to the point where the Iraqis are doing the fighting and dying, we're supporting them, and, over time, then it'll be the relation between the two countries."
McCain skirted questions about what kind of troop levels are acceptable in coming decades.
Because McCain unabashedly entertains the possibility of an open-ended military commitment in Iraq — with little more than a proviso that American personnel should not come in harm's way — we rule Clinton's statement True.
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John Edwards has targeted Clinton before for taking money from federal lobbyists. (Edwards and Barack Obama do not.) We've previously checked his allegations
here
that she gets the most money from the health industry, pharmaceutical companies, health insurance companies and defense companies. He was mostly right on those claims.
At the Democratic debate in Las Vegas, Edwards charged Clinton with raising the most money from the oil and gas industry.
But Edwards is a bit off here. Clinton is No. 1 among Democrats, according to the latest data analyzed by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research group that tracks money in politics.
Analyzing contributions from political action committees and individuals filed through Sept. 30, 2007, the center found the following totals from oil and gas companies:
* Rudy Giuliani $545,058
* Mitt Romney $309,933
* Hillary Clinton $220,550
* John McCain $189,935
* Barack Obama $106,112
* Ron Paul $34,102
* John Edwards $27,850
So it's true that Clinton has gotten significantly more than her Democratic rivals, but so far she's also been outraised by Republicans Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney. For this reason, we give Edwards' statement only a Half True.
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Sen. John McCain's immigration record has been a red flag for Republican primary voters both because it proposes granting legal status to most of the estimated 12-million illegal immigrants in the country and because McCain collaborated with liberal icon Sen. Edward M. Kennedy in developing it.
During a Republican debate on Jan. 5, 2008, McCain accused Mitt Romney of mischaracterizing the plan by describing it as amnesty — defined as a general pardon of offenders by a government.
"The fact is it's not amnesty," McCain said. "And for you to describe it as you do in the attack ads, my friend, you can spend your whole fortune on these attack ads, but it still won't be true."
Now, understand that the word amnesty is freighted with implications that go beyond immigration policy. Throughout the immigration debate in Congress in recent years, opponents have routinely labeled as "amnesty" any provision that would give illegal immigrants a path to legal status. Many voters interpret it as giving criminals the equivalent of a "Get Out of Jail" card instead of diligently enforcing the law.
Experts say its use here is designed to raise questions about whether McCain is willing to let rules slide and give lawbreakers access to social services and, more broadly, the American dream.
"Amnesty means, 'He's not for America in the same way I am' … They're trying to reach the people who believe in America for Americans. It's almost a code word for something else: fear and uncertainty about the economy, the war, where America is in the world," said Audrey Singer, an immigration expert and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Back to McCain's charge that the immigration overhaul plan he and Kennedy introduced in 2006 is not amnesty: He's got a strong point, given the hurdles that plan contains.
It would have required illegal immigrants to apply for a six-year conditional nonimmigrant visa. They then could apply for legal permanent residence — a green card — on the condition that they pay $1,000 in fines, pay all back taxes, pass a criminal background check, stay employed and demonstrate an effort to learn English and civics. They would also pay a $1,000 application fee.
Because a green card holder must wait five years to apply for citizenship, this plan would make illegal workers eligible for citizenship 11 years after applying for the visa. Arlen Specter, senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and some other plan supporters have characterized the steps as "gates" that must be passed through before an illegal immigrant can qualify for citizenship.
This is in contrast to what President Ronald Reagan did in 1986, when he signed an immigration reform bill that legalized the status of 1.7-million people. In checking a previous claim on that plan, we found it did qualify as
amnesty.
So, while McCain is more receptive to giving undocumented workers a path to citizenship than most of his GOP rivals, the many hurdles included in his plan do not qualify as a general pardon. We rule his statement True.
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Republican Mitt Romney, speaking from the campaign trail in Michigan, recalled his father's legacy as the owner of American Motors Corp. and the car that changed the industry.
"But, you see, when I was growing up, the fact that we won the mileage championship year after year with the Rambler was a source of great pride for my dad," Romney said during an interview on the CBS
Early Show
. "He used to campaign against the gas-guzzling dinosaurs."
Romney used a similar line in February 2007 when he launched his presidential campaign in Michigan, where he was born. It's the kind of claim that could, in our current energy climate, be dismissed as rewritten history. Campaigning against gas-guzzling cars in the '50s? Really?
And yet, this is not a case of inflated exuberance. George Romney took the helm at American Motors in 1954 and helped rescue the company from near financial ruin.
He succeeded in large part on the sales of the Rambler, the first American compact car. In doing so, he had to sell the concept and value of a compact car. In 1958, he traveled 700,000 miles in his crusade against what he called "gas-guzzling dinosaurs," a reference to the large cars produced by Detroit's Big Three automakers.
"Who wants to have a gas-guzzling dinosaur in his garage?" he told
Time
magazine in 1959, for a cover article that labeled George Romney "The Dinosaur Hunter."
He is credited with coining the term, even though other automakers cast doubts on just how economical the Rambler really was. Still, the nickname, and the George Romney legend, took hold. It appeared in prominent obituaries after his death July 26, 1995.
His youngest son, Mitt, gets it right.
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Under fire for raising taxes, Mike Huckabee is citing benefits of the extra tax money: school improvements, health care and better roads.
At a debate in Myrtle Beach, S.C., on Jan. 10, 2008, Huckabee repeated a claim he has made several times about how much Arkansas' roads improved.
"I took on the worst road system in the country, according to
Trucker's
magazine," Huckabee said. "When I left, they said it was the most improved road system in the country."
We find Huckabee glosses over some details but is right that his state made big improvements.
First, we couldn't find such an article in "Trucker's magazine" ... because we couldn't find a magazine by that name. It's clear he is referring to an annual survey done by
Overdrive
magazine ("The voice of the American trucker"), which asks truck drivers to name the best and worst highways.
When Huckabee took office in 1996,
Overdrive's
survey said Arkansas' roads were fifth worst in the United States. The state kept slipping in the rankings and by 2000 it was indeed the worst in the nation.
The shoddy highways persuaded the Arkansas Legislature to raise gasoline and diesel taxes in 1999, which paid for major repairs to the state's road network.
That helped.
By 2004, Arkansas was rated the state with the most improved roads in
Overdrive's
annual survey.
In 2006, Huckabee's last full year in office,
Overdrive
did not do overall rankings for the states, so it's a stretch for him to say they were most improved "when I left." However, the truckers that year listed Interstate 40 in Arkansas as the most improved road in the nation. Interstate 30 in Arkansas was No. 4 on the list.
Yet despite the improvement that occurred under Huckabee, the state's roads still rate near the bottom overall.
In the January 2008 issue, Arkansas is rated fifth worst – the same as when Huckabee took office.
"They have done a lot of work," said Andy Duncan, a senior editor for the magazine. "Nevertheless, the consensus is that they have a ways to go."
And so while Huckabee is right that the state earned the honor for the most improved roads at one point in his term, it's a stretch to say that was the case when he left office. And Arkansas still lags behind other states. So we rate Huckabee's claim Mostly True.
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As the candidates fell over themselves in a game of I-loved-Ronald Reagan one-upsmanship during a Jan. 10, 2008, debate in South Carolina, Mike Huckabee had the audacity to note that in Reagan's first year as governor of California, the Gipper raised taxes. A lot.
"You know, if Ronald Reagan were running tonight, there would be ads by the Club for Growth running against him because he raised taxes a billion dollars in his first year as governor of California," Huckabee said. "It would be $10-billion today."
Ronald "Send the welfare bums back to work" Reagan?
"Basically, yeah," said Kelly Barton, an archivist at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, Calif.
In the summer of 1967, during Reagan's first year as governor, and contrary to his campaign promises, Reagan signed off on a record tax increase for the state of California — an 18 percent, roughly $1-billion hike.
According to Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, the increase included boosting sales taxes from three to five cents on the dollar; raising the maximum income tax from 7 to 10 percent; and increases in bank, corporation, inheritance, liquor and cigarette taxes.
A little context is in order. In his autobiography,
An American Life,
Reagan said he inherited a $200-million deficit from his predecessor, Pat Brown. Reagan ordered a hiring freeze and other spending cuts.
But Reagan was a Republican governor in a state where the legislature was controlled by the Democrats, and he wasn't able to muster support for additional cuts. So, he ended up reluctantly signing off on the tax increases.
This is the second time in week that a Republican candidate has used Reagan to defend himself. In a debate on Jan. 5, 2008, Rudy Giuliani correctly pointed out that Reagan had endorsed a policy of amnesty for some illegal aliens. Read our ruling
here.
Now, Huckabee's math may be a little off on what that $1-billion would translate to today. It's actually closer to $6.3-billion.
But the bottom line, Huckabee's statement about Reagan is true.
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In a question at a New Hampshire debate, the Republican candidates were asked how they would campaign against Barack Obama if he wins the Democratic nomination. Mitt Romney's first response was to argue that Obama "wants the government to take over health care, spend hundreds of billions of dollars of new money for health insurance for everyone."
Problem is, Obama's plan keeps the free-market health care system intact, particularly employer-based insurance. His plan expands existing programs for the uninsured by increaseing eligibility for the poor and children to enroll in initiatives like Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program. His plan also creates pools for individuals to buy their own cheaper insurance. And it outlines several strategies aimed at reining in costs for everyone, such as streamlining medical record-keeping and emphasizing preventative care.
Romney is also off when he says that Obama wants to spend hundreds of billions of dollars. The Obama campaign has said that Obama believes the cost will be less than $100-billion — between $50-billion and $65-billion.
Romney is correct when he says Obama wants to cover everyone; Obama has said that is his goal. But Obama has no mandate requiring that adults buy health insurance. How many people would remain uninsured has become a hot issue in the Democratic primary. (See our coverage of this issue
here
. )
At best, Romney is wrong on two out of three points in his attack on the Obama health plan. It's not a government takeover and the purported cost is less than what Romney stated. For these reasons, we rate Romney's statement Barely True.
Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.
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With oil prices setting record highs and hovering around $100 a barrel, most candidates talked during a Jan. 5, 2008, debate about what they would do to bring prices down. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson talked about what he had already done.
Richardson served as secretary of the Energy Department under former President Bill Clinton, from late 1998 until the end of 2000.
"I went to OPEC countries and tried to get them to increase production so prices would go down," Richardson boasted. "At the time, there was a home heating oil crisis here in New England. I created reserves of home heating oil."
Richardson did indeed visit several OPEC countries in the spring of 2000, including Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, encouraging them to increase supply, which would help keep prices lower, according to the Energy Department Web site.
Those visits followed a memorably expensive winter for New Englanders, who suffered spiking prices for home heating oil, giving rise to what many called the Northeastern home heating oil crisis. Winter prices for home heating oil in New Hampshire more than doubled from February 1999 to February 2000, when New Hampshire prices peaked at $1.89 a gallon.
On July 10, 2000, President Clinton directed Richardson "to establish a 2-million barrel home heating oil component of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in the Northeast." With Richardson in charge, the Energy Department established the 2-million-barrel reserve later that year.
The following winter, prices fell back slightly, hovering in the mid $1.50s.
The Bush administration continued the home heating oil reserves, according to the Energy Department Web site. In mid 2007, those reserves stood just shy of 2-million barrels.
But that hasn't stopped prices from surging, as Richardson himself pointed out. "Look at prices now in New Hampshire, $3.20, something like that. It's the highest ever."
In fact, Richardson underestimated New Hampshire prices. The weekly average topped $3.34 a gallon on Dec. 31, 2007, according to the Energy Information Administration.
PolitiFact looked back at peak prices from the previous crisis. In February 2000 in New Hampshire, prices hit $1.89 per gallon. Using an inflation calculator from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we calculated that it equaled $2.31 in 2007 dollars, more than a dollar shy of the current price. We also looked back over Energy Information Administration prices for New Hampshire going back to 1990, adjusting several price spikes for inflation. None came close to today's price.
Richardson told the truth: He visited OPEC countries around the same time as the home heating oil crisis in New England, and he helped establish the home heating oil reserve.
Did that reserve lower prices? That's unclear, since the reserve remains today, even though — as Richardson himself points out — heating oil prices in New Hampshire are "the highest ever."
Still, Richardson earns a True.
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An anonymous chain e-mail warns its readers that the church Barack Obama belongs to has a "nonnegotiable commitment to Africa." That is an accurate statement from the church's Web site. But the e-mail implies that that commitment is anti-American, which we find is not the case. (Read our story about the whole e-mail
here
.)
Obama belongs to Trinity United Church of Christ, which is considered among the larger black megachurches in the United States. The presidential race has kept him away from the church recently, but he typically attends when he's in Chicago, according to his campaign.
Trinity preaches a Bible-based message of black self-reliance. Its motto is "Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian."
Trinity's commitment to Africa appears to be more a statement of philosophical orientation than of political support for any particular African country. The church offers classes about the continent and sponsors trips there. Its Web site, www.tucc.org, says it seeks to represent the concerns of Africa in the United States and compares its allegiance with other mainstream immigrant groups:
"Just as those of Jewish heritage advocate on behalf of the state of Israel, and those of Irish heritage advocate on behalf of Ireland, and those of Polish descent for Poland, so must we of African descent care about the land of our heritage — the continent of Africa."
Obama's father is from the nation of Kenya on the continent of Africa.
Trinity defended its teachings in a statement responding to the recent attacks:
"There is no anti-American sentiment in the theology or the practice of Trinity United Church of Christ. To be sure, there is prophetic preaching against oppression, racism and other evils that would deny the American ideal," it said.
The e-mail is correct that the Web site espouses a "nonnegotiable commitment to Africa," and a nonnegotiable commitment is pretty strong language. But the e-mail implies there's something politically sinister about this and that it somehow supersedes a commitment to America. We find no evidence for that contention. For these reasons, we rate the claim Mostly True.
UPDATE:
Barack Obama
resigned from Trinity United Church of Christ
on May 31, 2008, after church pastor Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. made controversial remarks about U.S. foreign policy and other matters. Obama said he intends to join another church after the election.
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An anonymous e-mail criticizes the church Barack Obama belongs to: "Notice too what color you will need to be if you want to join Obama's church... B-L-A-C-K!!!" (For more on this e-mail and its claims, read our story
here
.)
Barack Obama belongs to Trinity United Church of Christ, which serves predominantly African-American neighborhoods in Chicago and has a mostly African-American membership. But you do not have to be black to join Trinity. The church, which has been overwhelmed with media inquiries, said in a statement that it welcomes people of all races and has white members.
"There's no question (the e-mail) is a distortion," said Martin Marty, a retired Chicago-based historian of religion and public life, who is white and has attended services at Trinity several times.
Dwight Hopkins, a professor of divinity at the University of Chicago who attends Trinity and is black, said he also regularly sees a few white people at Trinity.
Many churches are ethnically homogenous, but that doesn't mean they require members to be a certain race. We find the e-mail's statement that Trinity United Church of Christ only accepts African-Americans for membership to be False.
UPDATE:
Barack Obama
resigned from Trinity United Church of Christ
on May 31, 2008, after church pastor Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. made controversial remarks about U.S. foreign policy and other matters. Obama said he intends to join another church after the election.
An anonymous chain e-mail claims Barack Obama could be a covert Muslim and his middle name is Mohammed. (For more on this e-mail and its claims, read our story
here
.)
First off, Barack Obama's middle name is not Mohammed; it's Hussein. He was named after his father, a Kenyan who came to the United States from Africa as a student.
The e-mail also raises the possibility that Obama is a "covert" Muslim at the same time it attacks his membership in the Trinity United Church of Christ, a Christian denomination. This claim seems contradictory at best.
Earlier this year, Obama spokeman Robert Gibbs said, "To be clear, Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian who attends the United Church of Christ in Chicago."
We find this claim to be so wrong we give it our Pants on Fire rating.
UPDATE:
Barack Obama
resigned from Trinity United Church of Christ
on May 31, 2008, after church pastor Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. made controversial remarks about U.S. foreign policy and other matters. Obama said he intends to join another church after the election.
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When it comes to energy independence, the United States has "an idea" but lacks "a program," according to former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. During the Jan. 5 debates in Manchester, N.H., he said, "We haven't built a refinery, I think, in 30 years."
It's been more than 30 years, said Bill Holbrook, communications director for the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association, an industry trade group. The last spanking-new refinery built in the United States was the Marathon Oil refinery in Garyville, La., in 1976.
But that's not the whole story, he said.
"When people say that, they're implying that the industry has done nothing to increase capacity," Holbrook complained. "And that is inaccurate."
The industry has found it costs less money and takes less time to expand existing facilities, he said. Over the past 15 years, the U.S. refining industry has added the equivalent of one new, state-of-the-art refinery a year, each with a capacity to refine 150,000 to 300,000 barrels per day.
Jonathan Cogan, senior analyst with the Energy Information Administration, echoed Holbrook: "Not quibbling with the wording, but it leads you to believe we haven't increased our refining capacity. We have."
In fact, the United States has added nearly 1.7-million barrels per day of refining capacity since 1985, according to the administration's records.
Cogan said Garyville is the last "significant" refinery built, and industry experts often think of it as the most recent. But there have been a handful of smaller refineries built since then. However, those can handle only a fraction of Garyville's capacity, according to the EIA, the information arm of the Department of Energy.
So Giuliani has the date right, but tells only part of the story. No significant refineries have been built in more than 30 years, but refining capacity in the United States has expanded substantially and smaller plants have been built. We rule his statement Barely True.
UPDATE:
The last new refinery of significant size built in the United States was a Marathon Oil refinery in Garyville, La. Previously, we reported an incorrect name for the facility.
Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.
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Mike Huckabee's new TV ad in Michigan portrays him as an energetic governor with lots of accomplishments in health care, education and tax-cutting. We've examined the
education
and
tax-cutting
claims before, so here we'll examine whether the ad is right when it says
Time
magazine called him "one of America's best governors."
Indeed, in November 2005,
Time
featured him in a story headlined "America's 5 Best Governors." (The others were Kenny Guinn of Nevada, Janet Napolitano of Arizona, Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas and Mark Warner of Virginia.)
The article said Huckabee "approached his state's troubles with energy and innovation" and cited his accomplishments with children's health care and economic growth. It called him "a mature, consensus-building conservative who earns praise from fellow Evangelicals and, occasionally, liberal Democrats."
Time
isn't the only publication to honor him that month.
Governing
magazine (which is owned by the same parent company as PolitiFact) named him one of its "Public Officials of the Year."
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Sen. Hillary Clinton has a new health care ad in Pennsylvania in which she accuses Sen. Barack Obama of attacking her, and then takes a few jabs at him.
Obama's plan "will cost taxpayers $1,700 more to cover each new person," Clinton's ad states. "Obama's health care plan leaves 15-million people with no coverage."
We've previously checked her statement that Obama's plan
leaves 15-million people without coverage and found it to be Half True
.
For evidence that Obama's plan will cost $1,700 more, the Clinton campaign pointed to a blog post by Paul Krugman of the
New York Times.
Krugman believes Clinton's plan, with its universal mandate that requires every person to have health insurance, is superior to Obama's plan, which does not.
Krugman's numbers come from a study by Jonathan Gruber, an economist with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Gruber's latest working paper is about covering the uninsured in the United States.
Gruber studied broad models for providing health insurance, comparing a plan that includes a mandate with one that does not. Krugman and Clinton's ad both correctly note that the per-person cost difference between the two models is about $1,700 per year.
But as Krugman notes, the models, while "broadly similar" to Clinton's and Obama's health plans, are not the same. For one thing, Obama's plan has a mandate for children, so it is not the same as a plan with no mandates at all.
Also, experts we've interviewed previously about the Clinton and Obama health plans have emphasized the difficulty of putting hard numbers to the campaign proposals. The proposals are broad outlines and contain little in the way of hard numbers for subsidies or eligibility for subsidized insurance. This makes it hard to say exactly how much the plans will cost. (
We looked at this point previously when Obama said his plan would save more
.)
So Clinton's ad is pushing the envelope quite a bit to say that her plan would save $1,700 per person. Yes, there is evidence that a mandate lowers costs for everyone, but whether $1,700 would be the difference between her and Obama's plan is a different matter. We find her statement to be Barely True.
Editor's note: This statement was rated Barely True when it was published. On July 27, 2011, we changed the name for the rating to Mostly False.
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