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Prescription-Strength Political Bunk

Politicians deliver even bigger doses of prescription-strength deception, deliberately filling voters' heads with disinformation about their opponents and about their own policies. One example is what we at FactCheck.org called a tax fable when it first surfaced in the 2004 campaign. The Republican National Committee chairman, Ed Gillespie, claimed in a speech on December 3, 2003, that under Bush's tax-cut bills “80 percent of the tax relief for upper-income filers goes to small businesses.” It turned out that Gillespie's definition of “small” businesses actually included all partnerships, a category that includes the nation's biggest accounting firms, law firms, and real-estate partnerships, and “businesses” that are really only sidelines, such as occasional rental income from a corporate chief's ski condo. Gillespie was trying to support the argument that cutting federal income taxes for high-income individuals translates at least in part to a tax cut for small businesses, stimulating hiring and thus helping some lower-income workers, too. But Gillespie was counting every rich person who got even a dollar in income from a small business as a “small-business owner”—and counting every dollar of tax benefit they received as relief for small business. Under that preposterous definition President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney both qualified as “small businesses,” by virtue of $84 Bush received from an oil-drilling partnership, and the consulting income of Cheney's wife, Lynne. Neither “business” was a notable job producer.

The Bush campaign would use the same twisted reasoning in a TV ad against John Kerry, claiming that Kerry's proposal to scale back Bush's tax cuts for those making $200,000 a year or more would mean “900,000 small business owners would pay higher tax rates than most multinational corporations.” In fact, according to analysis by the Tax Policy Center (a joint project of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution) the
maximum
number of small-business owners who could be affected—even by $1—was barely more than half the number the Bush ad claimed.

Voters Deceived

Not all voters are taken in by political snake oil, but many are. How many may surprise you. Bush's claim that Kerry's tax increase would have hit 900,000 small-business owners, for example, was found either “somewhat truthful” or “very truthful” by 62 percent of Americans polled after the 2004 election by the National Annenberg Election Survey. Only 24 percent found the statement “not too truthful” or “not truthful at all,” and the rest didn't know or didn't answer. That means that of those who had an opinion, two and a half times as many had the wrong idea as had the right one.

The deception took in members of both parties, though of course not equally. Unsurprisingly, Republicans were more inclined to believe the Republican president's deception than were Democrats. Among Republicans, 76 percent found the claim truthful. But 64 percent of independents also found it truthful, and—what
is
surprising—nearly half of all Democrats did too. Forty-nine percent of them were inclined to believe Bush's unfounded claim that their own candidate would raise taxes on 900,000 small businesses.

Dubious Campaign Claims Most Americans Believed

KERRY CLAIM:
The new jobs created since George W. Bush became president pay, on average, $9,000 a year less than the jobs they replaced.

BUSH CLAIM:
John Kerry's tax plan would increase taxes on 900,000 small-business owners.

Source: National Annenberg Election Survey, 2004. National telephone poll of adults Nov. 10–Dec. 15, 2004. Sample sizes: 1,669 for Kerry question, 1,731 for Bush question. The statistical margin of sampling error is +/- 2.4 percentage points.

Kerry deceived plenty of voters himself. Throughout the campaign he hammered away at the idea that the economy, which was finally creating hundreds of thousands of jobs after losing 2.6 million of them during Bush's first two and a half years in office, wasn't producing
good
jobs. Kerry insisted that the new jobs were paying thousands of dollars less than the old jobs that had disappeared, and he even claimed economists could measure the gap precisely. He said it in his acceptance speech to the Democratic National Convention and kept repeating it right through the third presidential debate, where he said, “The jobs the president is creating pay nine thousand dollars less than the jobs that we're losing.”

That $9,000 figure was fanciful. It didn't actually compare the wages of lost jobs to those of newer jobs, because nobody gathers statistics in a way that allows such precise job-to-job comparisons. We know of no reputable economist who endorsed Kerry's figure, and quite a few who thought it was silly and misleading.

The existing evidence was mixed. One set of figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that grouped workers into different industries—manufacturing, for example, or health care—did suggest that job quality was declining. But that analysis was contradicted by a separate set of BLS figures, based on a different survey and grouping workers by occupation: doctor, nurse, assembly-line worker, engineer. The second set of figures suggested that job quality was improving. The Brookings Institution economist Barry Bosworth, a former Carter administration official, called Kerry's approach “very misleading,” and added: “We shouldn't be in the business of trying to compare the rates of jobs lost to those gained because we just don't have the information right now to do it. Trying to measure the gross flow of jobs is really futile.” And, we wish to add, deceptive.

Bogus as Kerry's claim was, two of every three persons polled after the election said they found it truthful. And that even included a majority of those who said they voted for Bush: 56 percent of them believed Kerry's baseless claim that new jobs paid $9,000 less than the old jobs.

Bush's Pack of…Wolves

Political deceivers don't always state their falsehoods outright; sometimes they merely imply them. But the effect can be just as bad. Our polling found that voters went to cast their ballots burdened by a severely distorted picture of both candidates, often because of deceptions subtly laid between the lines.

Misleading TV Ad

Announcer:
In an increasingly dangerous world—even after the first terrorist attack on America—John Kerry and the liberals in Congress voted to slash America's intelligence operations. By six billion dollars—cuts so deep they would have weakened America's defenses. And weakness attracts those who are waiting to do America harm.

 

(On screen: several wolves eye the camera, as if preparing to attack.)

 

Bush:
I'm George W. Bush and I approve this message.

For example, one of the most deceptive ads of the 2004 campaign was a Bush commercial showing a pack of wolves, symbolizing terrorists about to attack. The announcer said Kerry had voted to cut intelligence spending “even after the first terrorist attack on America.” We don't know whether that was intended to deceive, but it did. The “first attack” referred to was the truck bomb that went off in the parking garage under one of the World Trade Center towers more than a decade earlier—in 1993. But we spoke to many casual viewers who heard “first terrorist attack” and automatically thought of the first aircraft to hit the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, a terrifying event still vivid in voters' memories.

The truth is that Kerry was supporting regular increases in intelligence spending for several years prior to the attacks of September 11. But our postelection polling shows most citizens—55 percent—found the statement that Kerry voted for intelligence cuts after September 11 to be “truthful.” That false notion may have cost Kerry votes. And we believe the false picture of Kerry foolishly trying to cut intelligence spending, even after a terrorist attack that U.S. intelligence had failed to prevent, was encouraged by the wording of Bush's ad and others like it.

The “Wolves” ad was deceptive in more direct ways as well. It said Kerry voted to “slash” intelligence spending by $6 billion, “cuts so deep they would have weakened America's defenses.” In truth, what Kerry supported was a $1 billion cut (as part of a much broader deficit-reduction package), which would have continued for five years. It amounted to a mere 3.7 percent of total intelligence spending. Would that have “weakened America's defenses” as the ad claimed? In 1995, when he was a Republican congressman, Bush's own CIA director Porter Goss had proposed to cut
20 percent
of the Central Intelligence Agency's staff. Kerry's dollar cut didn't have to come from the personnel side of the ledger, so Goss's Republican proposal would have cut more deeply into the human resources of the CIA than Kerry's. But the Bush deception worked. The public went to the polls with a mental picture of Kerry as much weaker on intelligence spending than his actual record reflected. The Bush team hadn't lied, exactly. But they gave millions of voters a false picture of Kerry's actual record on intelligence spending.

Partisan Falsehoods Most Americans Believed

FALSEHOOD:
John Kerry voted for cuts in intelligence after September 11, 2001.

Those finding statement “very truthful” or “somewhat truthful”: 55 percent

 

FALSEHOOD:
The Bush administration permitted members of the bin Laden family to fly out of the United States while U.S. airspace was still closed after September 11, 2001.

Those finding statement “very truthful” or “somewhat truthful”: 52 percent

Source: National Annenberg Election Survey, 2004. Postelection telephone poll of adults, Nov. 10–Dec. 15, 2004. Sample size: 1,731 for both questions. The statistical margin of sampling error is +/–2.4 percentage points.