His campaign website says, "Time For Truth, Governor Pawlenty begins his campaign by telling the American people the truth." Which makes sense since telling voters that you're going to lie to them is probably an unwise strategy. Voters like don't being lied to. The April results of the Townhall.com Presidential Straw Poll has Gov. Pawlenty (2.43%) in twelfth place out of seventeen other GOP-sters and a option for "undecided." Ron Paul won the poll with 18.67%, Sarah Palin, undeclared at this time, came in second with 13.42%.
Mr. Pawlenty made several statements this week in Iowa and various media sources have quickly taken issue with the candidate's honesty in his early campaign claims and promises. Let's look at three:
1) Igor Volsky shares several....(From ThinkProgress...)
T-PAW TRUTH: Health care reform has added to the national debt. Social Security is in peril. “Our national debt, combined with Obamacare, have placed Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid in real peril. I’ll tell young people the truth that over time and for them only, we’re going to gradually raise their Social Security retirement age.”
ACTUAL TRUTH: Health care reform reduced health care spending.According to the Congressional Budget Office, enacting the Affordable Care Act “will produce a net reduction in federal deficits of $143 billionover the 2010-2019 period.” Similarly, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) concluded that Medicare spending will decline$86.4 billion and that by 2019, it is projected to grow 7.7 percent—0.9 percentage point more slowly” than if the law had not passed.
ACTUAL TRUTH: Social Security is not in real peril. It can pay full benefits through 2036 and close to full benefits for decades after that, according to the latest trustee’s report. Moderate tweaks to the system, including raising the cap on the payroll tax can more than make up for the program’s long-term shortfall. Raising the retirement age is not only unnecessary, but is a hugely regressive change. Furthermore, the Affordable Care Act and the national debt have nothing to do with the financial health of Social Security.
T-PAW TRUTH: Block granting Medicaid will “solve problems.” “And, we need to block grant Medicaid to the states. There, innovative reformers closest to the patients can solve problems and save money.”
ACTUAL TRUTH: Millions of lower-income Americans will lose health coverage. As a recent Kaiser Family Foundation report pointed out, converting the existing matching rate formula into a block grant would give states less money that they would have otherwise received and force local governments to cut eligibility to the program. Kaiser examined different scenarios for state responses to reduced federal Medicaid spending and estimated 31 to 44 million Americans could lose their health insurance coverage.
T-PAW TRUTH: Reformed health system in Minnesota. “I know how to do health care reform right. I’ve done it at the state level. No mandates, no takeovers. and it’s the opposite of Obamacare.”
ACTUAL TRUTH: Number of uninsured increased under his governorship. Pawlenty did experiment with different methods of bundling payments to providers — creating baskets for certain conditions — and implemented pay-for performance initiatives, but as Minnesota Public Radio has reported, it’s unclear if his small efforts have actually saved the state any money. But most importantly, as David Frum has pointed out, the number of Minnesotans without health care actually increased during his time as governor from 395,000 citizens without health insurance in 2003, to 446,000 in 2008, the last year before the recession struck.
T-PAW TRUTH: The United States is broke. “Our country is going broke.”
ACTUAL TRUTH: The United States isn’t broke. As the Center for American Progress’ Michael Linden and Michael Ettlinger note, “The notion that the United States is ‘broke’ is a popular talking point for conservative lawmakers…But we’re not broke. Not at all. If we were, it would mean that we were out of money, unable to pay our bills, or meet our financial obligations. We are none of those things.” Bloomberg’s David Lynch has more.
T-PAW TRUTH: Against bailouts and “too-big-to-fail”. “I’m going to New York City, to tell Wall Street that if I’m elected, the era of bailouts, handouts, and carve outs will be over. No more subsidies, no more special treatment. No more Fannie and Freddie, no more TARP, and no more “too big to fail.”
ACTUAL TRUTH: Pawlenty would preserve too-big-to-fail and has flip-flopped on bailouts. The Dodd-Frank financial reform law signed by President Obama last year includes important powers for the government to dismantle large, failed financial firms without resorting to ad-hoc bailouts; Pawlenty opposes those powers. Pawlenty was also for TARP before he was against it, saying in 2008 that TARP “is an imperfect solution, but, like has been said, [the banks] are too big, the consequences are too severe for innocent bystanders to allow them to fail.”
T-PAW TRUTH: The NLRB can dictate to companies where to move. “It especially means the National Labor Relations Board will never again tell an American company where it can and can’t do business.”
ACTUAL TRUTH: The NLRB has not told an American company where it can and can’t do business. Pawlenty has been criticizing a decision by the NLRB that would prevent mega-manufacturer Boeing from shifting a production line from Washington state to South Carolina as retribution against workers who engaged in strikes. Under labor law, it is illegal to retaliate against striking workers by shifting production, but the NLRB has made it abundantly clear that Boeing is free to open new facilitieswherever it pleases, provided it complies with the law.
T-PAW TRUTH: Against energy subsidies. “As part of a larger reform, we need to phase out subsidies across all sources of energy and all industries, including ethanol. We simply can’t afford them anymore.”
ACTUAL TRUTH: For oil and gas subsidies. Just a few weeks ago, Pawlenty said that cutting subsidies to oil and gas companies is “ludicrous.” “I mean the worst thing we could do is raise the cost burden on costs on energy and oil…It’s preposterous,” he said.
2) Wait, there's more from the Associated Press...
FACT CHECK: Not the whole truth in Pawlenty claims...
A parsing of Pawlenty's opening-day statements shows they were not the whole truth.
Here is a sampling of his claims Monday and how they compare with the facts.
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PAWLENTY: "The truth is, people getting paid by the taxpayers shouldn't get a better deal than the taxpayers themselves. That means freezing federal salaries, transitioning federal employee benefits, and downsizing the federal work force as it retires." — Campaign announcement.
THE FACTS: A federal pay freeze is already in effect. Obama proposed and Congress approved a two-year freeze on the pay of federal employees, exempting the armed forces, Congress and federal courts.
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PAWLENTY: "ObamaCare is unconstitutional." — USA Today column.
THE FACTS: Obama's health care overhaul might be unconstitutional in Pawlenty's opinion, but it is not in fact unless the Supreme Court says so. Lower court rulings have been split.
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PAWLENTY: "Barack Obama has consistently stood for higher taxes." — Campaign announcement.
THE FACTS: Obama's record shows more tax cutting than tax raising. The stimulus plan early in his presidency cut taxes broadly for the middle class and business, and more recently he won a substantial cut in Social Security taxes for a year. He also campaigned in support of extending the Bush-era tax cuts for all except the wealthy, whose taxes he wanted to raise. In office, he accepted a deal from Republicans extending the tax cuts for all. As for tax increases, Obama won congressional approval to raise them on tobacco and tanning salons. The penalty for those who don't buy health insurance, once coverage is mandatory, is a form of taxation.
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PAWLENTY: "For decades before I was elected, governors tried and failed to get Minnesota out of the top 10 highest-taxed states in the country. I actually did it." — Campaign announcement.
THE FACTS: Minnesota remains among the 10 worst states in its overall tax climate, according to the Tax Foundation. In its 2011 State Business Tax Climate Index, the anti-tax organization ranks Minnesota 43rd, making it the eighth worst state. The ranking slipped from 41st two years earlier. The index considers corporate, individual, sales, unemployment insurance and property taxes.
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PAWLENTY: "I stood up to the teachers unions and established one of the first statewide performance pay systems in the country." — Campaign announcement.
THE FACTS: The system may be statewide, but it is voluntary and most school districts have not joined. Out of the 340 school districts and charter schools in the state, with 830,000 students, 104 districts and charter schools serving 254,592 students are currently enrolled in the performance-pay program.
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PAWLENTY: "There's only four governors in the country that got an A grade from the tough-grading Cato Institute for fiscal management. I was one of them." — ABC's "Good Morning America."
THE FACTS: Cato may be a tough grader, but it is hardly objective. The institute holds staunch libertarian views, including a passion for smaller government, and graded governors in 2010 according to their success in cutting taxes and spending. Pawlenty tied for third with Democratic Gov. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, behind South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, both Republicans.
3) What does Factcheck.org have to say about T-Paw's truthfulness?FactChecking Pawlenty
We are periodically taking a look at past claims from the 2012 presidential candidates. Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty released a web video, announcing that he was running for president, and he'll kick off his campaign in Iowa. In recent months, we have found him straying from the facts.
- In a January interview on "Fox News Sunday," Pawlenty said that he "never did sign a bill relating to cap and trade" while governor of Minnesota. But that's false. He signed a 2007 bill requiring a task force to come up with recommendations on how Minnesota could institute cap and trade. Plus, Pawlenty joined other Midwestern governors in signing a compact to "develop a market-based and multi-sector cap-and-trade mechanism." Pawlenty also claimed that "I’ve opposed cap and trade." But that's only been the case since 2009, when Pawlenty wrote a letter to his state’s congressional delegation saying that a federal cap-and-trade bill was "overly bureaucratic, misguided."
- Pawlenty also changed his view of government bailouts, saying in January: "I don’t think the government should bail out Wall Street or the mortgage industry or for that matter any other industry." But in 2008 at a National Press Club luncheon, he said that in an "ideal marketplace" entities would be allowed to fail. "But if you allow those entities to fail, the consequences are so severe for innocent bystanders, namely average Americans who rely on the markets, rely on those mortgages, you know, the consequences are too severe. … [T]hey are too big, the consequences are too severe for innocent bystanders to allow them to fail."
- He was well off the mark when he said in a December op-ed for the Wall Street Journal that "local, state and federal governments added 590,000" jobs since January 2008, while private sector employment had declined by millions. The private sector job loss, as of Pawlenty's writing, was 7.3 million, but public sector jobs had also gone down — not up, as Pawlenty claimed. Figures on government employment showed a loss of 118,000 jobs. It turns out Pawlenty got his information from a several months' old blog post.
- Pawlenty also repeated a popular and misleading conservative talking point when he said that "[f]ederal employees receive an average of $123,049 annually in pay and benefits, twice the average of the private sector," also in that op-ed. The figures came from USA Today and the Cato Institute, but we found that the government pay and benefits included retiree health and life insurance benefits, and money Congress uses to cover "unfunded liabilities" for retirees. Also, the average federal worker has more education and experience than the average private sector worker, and these compensation figures fail to take that into account.
Its a dubious start for a candidate who advertises himself as the candidate who'll look the American people in the eye and tell them the truth, isn't it? But, truth be told, the other three most well known Republican candidates each have their own troubles. Mitt Romney and his ballet with Romneycare - "good" is NOT Obamacare - "bad", Newt Gingrinch with several issues including his clumsy performance on Meet The Press when he called the Ryan Medicare Plan "radical Right wing social engineering", unpleasant experiences in an airport and book signing and having to explain his Tiffany's bill. Ron Paul, who reportedly feels the Country might be better off if we legalized Heroin and Prostitution.
I suspect candidate Pawlenty may come to regret his chosen theme and some of his claims. As the Republican party prepares to eat its own until there is one left standing, I think the former Governor may have a hard time defending all of his questionable claims. If Romney can get past Romneycare, he may find smooth sailing. Gingrich needs to work past one horrific Sunday morning and stop putting his foot in his mouth, or in other words, prove that he can be what others claim he can't be. Disciplined. Congressman Paul, while charming, refreshing and certainly different from the rest, is in a tough position. If he tones his message down so as not to frighten voters of a crazy man in the White House, he loses the exact element that differentiates him from the others.
What Mr. Pawlenty now faces is a constant defense of his claims. Each explanation may sound weaker than the last. How many lashes can one candidate handle? He's going to find out.
Sources:
http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2011/05/23/pawlenty-truth-campaign/
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hSE448AysxOgPQc9lFL3JbZkYSuA?docId=22ee015006644d5b8b4d9d841d172409
http://factcheck.org/2011/05/factchecking-pawlenty/
http://www.timpawlenty.com/
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