Candidates And The Facts Clinton And Dole Back Their Arguments With Statistics, But The Numbers Don’t Always Add Up To The Truth

Both President Bill Clinton and Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole have liberally laced their campaigns this fall with false, distorted and exaggerated information, not even stopping when they’re called on it.

“Putting the best face on the argument and the evidence (is) something presidential candidates do,” said Thomas Mann, a political analyst at the Washington, D.C.-based Brookings Institution.

And in the Clinton-Dole contest, “I don’t see one shading the truth more than the other,” he added.

If there is anything new this year, however, it is the use of statistical data, creating “the illusion that the rhetoric is evidence-driven,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication. Here are some of the best examples from the 1996 presidential campaign.

Medicare

Clinton has repeatedly asserted that Dole, as the Senate’s leader, supported a seven-year $270 billion “cut” in Medicare, the government health care program for the elderly.

What Dole actually supported was a Republican plan to slow the growth of Medicare by $158 billion over the next seven years. Actually spending on the program still would increase about 7 percent a year.

As part of his attack on Dole’s Medicare position, Clinton has also frequently cited a study by the American Hospital Association (AHA) which, according to the president, estimated 700 hospitals “could have closed” under the GOP spending plan.

Actually, the AHA study merely noted that 708 hospitals would be hard hit by the GOP plan. And while the AHA has contacted the White House asking the president to stop distorting their study’s findings, the president continues to do so.

Meanwhile, though, Dole and Republican National Committee Chairman Haley Barbour have maintained that the American Association for Retired Persons (AARP) supports the GOP Medicare plan. The AARP does not and has asked Dole and Barbour to stop saying so.

The economy

Dole, who made tax cuts the centerpiece of his campaign, has charged that the U.S. economy under Clinton has been “the worst economy in the century.”

Not quite.

Under Clinton, the economy has grown at an annual rate of 2.7 percent, twice that of the Bush years but not as robust as the 3.0 percent during the Reagan presidency.

The worst single year for the economy since the Depression was 1982 when, during the Reagan recession, the economy shrunk 2.1 percent.

Clinton has maintained that a welcomed new feature to the economy is the Medical and Family Leave Act, which he claims has allowed 12 million Americans to take time off from their jobs for personal matters.

But a congressional committee recently reported that a large majority of those would have been eligible for the leave even without the new law, and only about 4 percent of those eligible for leave under the law had taken it.

Crime

Clinton, promising a get-tough approach to crime, has claimed that he has put 100,000 new police officers on America’s streets. Actually, however, only about 40,000 of those new officers have been funded, and only about 21,000 of them actually are on duty.

Dole has made much of a recent government report showing a dramatic rise in the use of marijuana among teenagers since 1992. Dole has blamed the president for the increase, accusing Clinton of being “AWOL in the war on drugs.”

The rise in marijuana use actually began the year before Clinton took office.

However, Clinton, in an effort to fulfill his promise of cutting the White House staff by 25 percent, cut nearly four-fifths of the drug czar’s office, only recently restoring the cuts.

But Dole, in criticising Clinton for cutting the drug czar’s office, fails to mention the fact that he voted against even creating the office.

Taxes

At every campaign stop, Dole charges that Clinton imposed “the biggest tax increase in history” on the American people in 1993. As far as it goes, Dole’s charge is true.

However, a true comparison of tax hikes is possible only if the amounts are adjusted for inflation.

Clinton’s 1993 tax hike totaled $241 billion. Using 1993 dollars as a measure, however, a tax hike imposed in 1982 would equal $266 billion - the biggest ever. That hike was sponsored by Dole.

Clinton, on the other hand, likes to claim that his 1993 tax hike was imposed only the top 2 percent of wage earners. But the tax package also raised the taxable portion of Social Security benefits for higher-earning elderly people, and it added 4.3 cents per gallon to the gas tax.