Posted by Damozel | Via The Horse's Mouth, consider this article in The New York Times challenging, in the words of THM, "the chronic mendacity" or, in the words of BN-Politics, the frequently questionable accuracy of Rudy Giuliani: "In almost every appearance as he campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination, Rudolph W. Giuliani cites a fusillade of statistics and facts to make his arguments about his successes in running New York City and the merits of his views....And while, to be sure, all candidates use misleading statistics from time to time, Mr. Giuliani has made statistics a central part of his candidacy as he campaigns on his record. " (NYT)
The New York Times piece then proceeds to identify statistics cited by Giuliani which "are incomplete, exaggerated or just plain wrong."(NYT)
I've culled from the NYT piece a fairly impressive list of statistics Mr. Giuliani
has cited in support of his points and which have turned out to be, shall
we say, not quite on target:
Discussing his crime-fighting success as mayor, Mr. Giuliani told a television interviewer that New York was “the only city in America that has reduced crime every single year since 1994...[A]nother major American city claims to have reduced crime every year since 1994: Chicago.
In New Hampshire this week, he told a public forum that when he became mayor in 1994, New York “had been averaging like 1,800, 1,900 murders for almost 30 years.....New York averaged 1,514 murders a year during the three decades before Mr. Giuliani took office; it did not record more than 1,800 homicides until 1980.
When a recent Republican debate turned to the question of fiscal responsibility, he boasted that “under me, spending went down by 7 percent...Mr. Giuliani’s own memoir states that spending grew an average of 3.7 percent for most of his tenure; an aide said Mr. Giuliani had meant to say that he had proposed a 7 percent reduction in per capita spending during his time as mayor....Last weekend, speaking about his belief in supply-side economics, Mr. Giuliani said, “I lowered, argued for lowering, and got the hotel occupancy tax lowered by 33 percent. And I was collecting $200 million more from the lower tax than the city had been collecting from before I was mayor from the higher tax.”
In fact, the increase in revenues from the hotel occupancy tax was just over a quarter of what Mr. Giuliani asserted — the city’s hotel tax revenues grew by roughly $58 million during his term, according to the city’s Independent Budget Office — and a booming economy, as well as the reduction in crime Mr. Giuliani helped produce, probably played a part.
Factcheck.org has reported that the Giuliani campaign exaggerated when it boasted on its Web site that “Mayor Giuliani increased the police force from 28,000 to 40,000,” noting that most of that increase came from his merger of the Transit and Housing Police Departments with the New York Police Department, a transfer of more than 7,000 existing officers to the department.
The campaign argues that giving housing and transit police officers jurisdiction beyond the city’s public housing and subways gave the city more flexibility to fight crime. It said that it usually notes the effects of the merger when describing the size of the police force, and said it would change a post on its Web site to mention the merger when citing the increase....
And the group also found that Mr. Giuliani erred at a Republican debate when, while calling for tort reform, he said that 2.2 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product “is spent on all these frivolous lawsuits.” That statistic, the group reported, came from a study that pegged the cost of all civil claims at 2.2 percent of the G.D.P., without judging whether the cases had merit or not.....
In a recent radio advertisement by the campaign about his health care proposal, Mr. Giuliani repeated another false statement that he had been using on the campaign trail. In the advertisement Mr. Giuliani, who has had prostate cancer, asserted that his chances of surviving prostate cancer in the United States were 82 percent, while his chance of surviving in England would have been only 44 percent. His point was that the American health care system is far superior to England’s government-run system, which he refers to as “socialized medicine.”
The figure came from an article written by one of Mr. Giuliani’s health care advisers, but was soon discredited: the source of the research that was used to derive the statistic said that its data had been misused. The Office for National Statistics in Britain said that the true five-year survival rate was 74.4 percent — still lower than in the United States, but by a much smaller margin. Mr. Giuliani stood by the statistic, however, and kept using the advertisement, though it has since gone off the air.Another radio advertisement that Mr. Giuliani ran over the summer stated that as mayor he “turned a $2.3 billion deficit into a multibillion-dollar surplus.”
That was also misleading. According to independent fiscal monitors, Mr. Giuliani did have to close a $2.3 billion deficit in his first budget, and did accumulate a multibillion-dollar surplus during his tenure. But by Mr. Giuliani’s last full fiscal year in office, the city was spending more than it was taking in in revenues, and Mr. Giuliani ended up spending almost all of the surplus to balance his final budget.
Last weekend, questions about Mr. Giuliani’s use of facts moved front and center in the campaign. Mr. Giuliani charged that “violent crime and murder went up” in Massachusetts while Mr. Romney was governor. The number of reported killings did go up in those years, but the state’s overall rate of violent crime went down, according to statistics compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Mr. Romney accused Mr. Giuliani of having “a real problem with facts,” and aides circulated a statement calling Mr. Giuliani’s crime statistics “about as accurate as his prostate cancer survival numbers for England.”
“He has now done this time and again, making up facts that just happen to be wrong, and facts are stubborn things,” Mr. Romney said. (NYT)
His aides, evidently "big picture" types, shrug off the challenges to Giuliani's---let's call them "imprecise statistics"---as nitpicking. (NYT) If the overall message is right, they seem to be saying, does it matter if he gets a fact wrong here and there? (NYT) "“The mayor likes detail, and uses it frequently on the campaign trail in ways the other candidates don’t,” said Maria Comella, a spokeswoman for Mr. Giuliani. “And at the end of the day, he is making points that are true.” (NYT) What? At the end of the day, it's quite likely the Bush Administration thought that it was making points that were broadly true when it told us that it had evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and connections to Al-Quaeda, and the only way to deal with him was to go to war in Iraq. (NYT)
I've said it before: Republicans clearly think their "base" is very erm, credulous, and very unconcerned with facts and perhaps we should defer to their assessment in that respect. But that doesn't mean that I want the press to sit silently by on the sidelines while Giuliani tries to blind them with science. The "Big Picture" ultimately is only as accurate as its constituent parts. If you create it out of reflections which are all individually slightly imprecise, it adds up to a fairly large distortion on the whole. On the whole, I think Giuliani's big picture is about as accurate a reflection of reality as a carnival house mirror.
Frank Luntz, the Republican strategist who has apparently based his career on the hypothesis that it really is possible to fool some of the people all of the time if they happen to be Republican, doesn't think that Giuliani's many, many misstatements will hurt him politically. (NYT) As long as the statements ring true, he says, people---by which I suppose he means people likely to vote for Giuliani a/k/a "Republicans---won't care if he regularly bases them on facts that are wrong. Well, they certainly didn't care when Bush did the same thing, so he's probably right.
But I wonder if the bit of trouble he's in now will be seen differently by them? Checking through the first reactions of bloggers, I found that many conservatives seemed a bit disturbed by the allegations that he used public funds to defray some of the costs of his affair with his former mistress/current third wife. And---for reasons I addressed here---at least some of those allegations, if (I said IF) established, definitely have the potential to sink his campaign. Republicans might not mind getting incomplete, distorted, or downright inaccurate information, and they might even be able to stomach an illicit (heterosexual) affair that ended in marriage, but some of them apparently are very sensitive about having a candidate expend public funds in the course of pursuing a clandestine romance.
Well, we'll see.
Memeorandum discusses The Horse's Mouth piece here.
Blogger reaction is here: on, The Moderate Voice, Washington Monthly, The Newshoggers, Dick Polman's American Debate and The Carpetbagger Report
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Great Post, but I think you might be concerned about the photo used. Before he betrayed Damato, Rudi studied at his knees. Damato would not hesitate to call your photo an anti-Italian slur, and I'm sure the Rudestir would do the same.
Posted by: bbbustard | November 30, 2007 at 05:30 PM