Right Change: Fact-Checking the Clinton Speech

While we all know even fact-checking websites can bring their own bias, it is fun to browse these articles to see how much spin is going on in this week’s DNC speeches. Bill Clinton took the stage Wednesday night and gave a good, albeit way too long, speech officially nominating Barack Obama as the party’s presidential candidate. Both the Washington Post and FactCheck.org offered opinions on the details of Clinton’s speech. It is fair to say there were a few exaggerations, missteps and even some squirrely arithmetic.

Perhaps the most egregious part of the speech was the credit Clinton tried to give Obamacare for the decreases in Americans’ health care spending. FactCheck.org called it “Overselling Obamacare."

Clinton said that “for the last two years, health care costs have been under 4 percent in both years for the first time in 50 years.” That’s true, as reported by the journal Health Affairs in January of this year. But Clinton went too far when he added: “So let me ask you something. Are we better off because President Obama fought for health care reform? You bet we are.”

Actually, the major provisions of the 2010 law — the individual mandate, federal subsidies to help Americans buy insurance, and big reductions in the growth of Medicare spending — haven’t yet taken effect. Experts mainly blame the lousy economy for the slowdown in health care spending. As a report by economists and statisticians at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reported last year, for example (as quoted in the Washington Post): “Job losses caused many people to lose employer-sponsored health insurance and, in some cases, to forgo health-care services they could not afford.”

And this year, the New York Times also reported: The growth rate mostly slowed as millions of Americans lost insurance coverage along with their jobs. Worried about job security, others may have feared taking time off work for doctor’s visits or surgical procedures, or skipped non-urgent care when money was tight.

The Times also quoted experts who said consumers’ and physicians’ behavior may be changing, and the “anticipation of the health care overhaul” could be a reason. Said theTimes: “Many health care experts said they believed that the shift toward publicizing medical error rates and encouraging accountable care seemed to be paying dividends — and that providers were making changes in anticipation of the health care overhaul, which further emphasize accountable care.” But that would explain only part of the slowdown, if it’s truly a factor at all.

The former president also tried to give Obama’s policies credit for dropping the amount of oil imported into the United States over the past few years. While it is true the country is importing less oil, it is not due to any policy President Obama has put into place.

Clinton’s point was that the president’s energy policies were “helping” to bring that about. Bloomberg, however, gave credit to “a boom in oil production from the shale formations of North Dakota and Texas,” made possible by a drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing.

Finally, The Washington Post rebuts several claims Clinton made about Obama’s job creation and economic plans. Clinton claimed “during this period, more than 500,000 manufacturing jobs have been created under President Obama. That’s the first time manufacturing jobs have increased since the 1990s.” The Post disagreed.

Clinton is referring to the period since February 2010, the administration’s preferred date for counting employment figures. If you count from the beginning of Obama’s term, Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that manufacturing jobs have declined by more than 500,000. Manufacturing jobs have been on a long steep decline since the middle of Clinton’s term, with some 2 million jobs lost during the recession that started at the end of George W. Bush’s term.

As for Obama’s plan to reduce the deficit, Clinton has this to say. “He has offered a reasonable plan of $4 trillion in debt reduction over a decade. For every $2.5 trillion in spending cuts, he raises a dollar in new revenues, 2.5 to 1. And he has tight controls on future spending.” The WP folks say this is funny math.

The repeated claim that Obama’s budget reduces the deficit by $4 trillion is simply not accurate. The $4 trillion figure, for instance, includes counting some $1 trillion in cuts reached a year ago in budget negotiations with Congress. So no matter who is the president, the savings are already in the bank.

Moreover, the administration is also counting $848 billion in phantom savings from winding down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even though the administration had long made clear those wars would end. In other words, by projecting war spending far in the future, the administration is able to claim credit for saving money it never intended to spend. (Imagine taking credit for saving money on buying a new car every year, even though you intended to keep your car for 10 years.) 

The administration also counts $800 billion in savings in debt payments (from lower deficits) as a “spending cut,” which is a dubious claim. We didn’t realize that debt payments were now considered a government program.

Overall, Bill Clinton did what he has always done best: he spoke eloquently, confidently and found new and creative ways to blur the truth. But underlying these trademark Clinton traits was a forced endorsement for Barack Obama. The speech included far too many references to Mr. Clinton himself (as noted by the numbers of time he used his own name versus Obama’s) and seemed disingenuous at the critical moments reserved to rally the troops around the incumbent. It left one to wonder if Bill was trying to find a way to himself run for the office again. At any rate, the fact checkers agree: there was a lot more spin than substance.

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