I spent months tallying data to definitively determine the worst President of the Unites States ever. The answer: Grover Cleveland.
OK, he wasn't the worst ever, but I did hear an interesting story on NPR this morning about how Cleveland snuck away for five days in the summer of 1893 to have a cancerous tumor removed from his mouth. The whole procedure was performed aboard his friend’s fishing boat to keep the surgery a secret. True story.
Times change. In 2011, President Obama couldn't sneak away for five hours without cameras catching the President and a short-panted Speaker Boehner playing golf.
Yet, some things stay the same. In every campaign season we reach a point when there seems no shortage of those willing to reduce mountains of data into neat sound bites to show indubitably they are on the side of right and the other side is not only wrong, but possibly evil. We may have reached the crazed phase of speaking in partisan absolutes a bit early this election cycle.
A case in point is Jeffrey H. Anderson’s current blog at the conservative Weekly Standard. Anderson takes a bunch of actual facts, strips away a cluster of others and sprinkles in a dash of political rhetoric to brew up his argument that the Obama Administration is a failure.
Taking numbers from a report by the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors, Anderson writes the economic stimulus package pushed by President Obama has cost $666 billion to date. (Anderson may not have appreciated the happy coincidence that 666 is a popular Biblical reference to evil and the Antichrist, but something tells me a number of his readers did.) He then divides that by 2.4 million, the number of jobs some have estimated were created or saved by stimulus spending, to create this tasty morsel, “In other words, the government could simply have cut a $100,000 check to everyone whose employment was allegedly made possible by the ‘stimulus,’ and taxpayers would have come out $427 billion ahead.”
The problem with his construct is one has to ignore the fact the "stimulus" program wasn't just about jobs. A portion of the money expended went for non-job items like the tax credit 110 million working families received, the $27 billion in small business loans 110,000 small businesses received, and the more than 75,000 projects that improved some of the country’s infrastructure. Jobs are important, but the improved roads and other assets the government will own and use long into the future need to be calculated if an analysis of the impact of the stimulus expenditure is to be taken seriously.
I have to admit it is kind of fun to ponder what would have happened if 2.4 million Americans would have received checks for $100k, but I tend to agree with a tenet long espoused by many of the writers and readers of the Weekly Standard that entitlement programs have a limited place in good government. And, handing out whopping checks to a few individuals would have done nothing to improve the bridges, ports and countless other pieces of infrastructure seen as vital to Republicans, Democrats and Independents alike.
In Anderson’s rush to condemn the stimulus and the President’s policies, he played with the facts and hurt his own argument.
Just as important. one can’t evaluate history before it has occurred. Like whiskey, history must be distilled. Both are complex compounds containing a vast range of ingredients and neither can be assessed fully while still being made. It takes a long while before anyone can evaluate either with any objectivity and it is not possible to strip away individual ingredients from the final brews. History, like whiskey, has to be evaluated on the whole.
There were no shortage of people willing to pontificate about how President George W. Bush was taking a direct route into the history books to destination “worst ever” while he was Commander in Chief. And, there seem to be at least as many who are willing to sum up President Obama’s record before the facts can be written as well. Time will tell and by then partisans like Mr. Anderson will be trying to creatively interpret the historical record of some other politician long before it has been written.
We have a long way to travel before the 2012 election. I, for one, am going to do my best to recognize the difference between what is fact and what is a half-truth partisan absolute. I hope most of my fellow voters will do the same.
Graham Gillette can be reached at grahamgillette@gmail.com
OK, he wasn't the worst ever, but I did hear an interesting story on NPR this morning about how Cleveland snuck away for five days in the summer of 1893 to have a cancerous tumor removed from his mouth. The whole procedure was performed aboard his friend’s fishing boat to keep the surgery a secret. True story.
Times change. In 2011, President Obama couldn't sneak away for five hours without cameras catching the President and a short-panted Speaker Boehner playing golf.Yet, some things stay the same. In every campaign season we reach a point when there seems no shortage of those willing to reduce mountains of data into neat sound bites to show indubitably they are on the side of right and the other side is not only wrong, but possibly evil. We may have reached the crazed phase of speaking in partisan absolutes a bit early this election cycle.
A case in point is Jeffrey H. Anderson’s current blog at the conservative Weekly Standard. Anderson takes a bunch of actual facts, strips away a cluster of others and sprinkles in a dash of political rhetoric to brew up his argument that the Obama Administration is a failure.
Taking numbers from a report by the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors, Anderson writes the economic stimulus package pushed by President Obama has cost $666 billion to date. (Anderson may not have appreciated the happy coincidence that 666 is a popular Biblical reference to evil and the Antichrist, but something tells me a number of his readers did.) He then divides that by 2.4 million, the number of jobs some have estimated were created or saved by stimulus spending, to create this tasty morsel, “In other words, the government could simply have cut a $100,000 check to everyone whose employment was allegedly made possible by the ‘stimulus,’ and taxpayers would have come out $427 billion ahead.”
The problem with his construct is one has to ignore the fact the "stimulus" program wasn't just about jobs. A portion of the money expended went for non-job items like the tax credit 110 million working families received, the $27 billion in small business loans 110,000 small businesses received, and the more than 75,000 projects that improved some of the country’s infrastructure. Jobs are important, but the improved roads and other assets the government will own and use long into the future need to be calculated if an analysis of the impact of the stimulus expenditure is to be taken seriously.
I have to admit it is kind of fun to ponder what would have happened if 2.4 million Americans would have received checks for $100k, but I tend to agree with a tenet long espoused by many of the writers and readers of the Weekly Standard that entitlement programs have a limited place in good government. And, handing out whopping checks to a few individuals would have done nothing to improve the bridges, ports and countless other pieces of infrastructure seen as vital to Republicans, Democrats and Independents alike.
In Anderson’s rush to condemn the stimulus and the President’s policies, he played with the facts and hurt his own argument.
Just as important. one can’t evaluate history before it has occurred. Like whiskey, history must be distilled. Both are complex compounds containing a vast range of ingredients and neither can be assessed fully while still being made. It takes a long while before anyone can evaluate either with any objectivity and it is not possible to strip away individual ingredients from the final brews. History, like whiskey, has to be evaluated on the whole.
There were no shortage of people willing to pontificate about how President George W. Bush was taking a direct route into the history books to destination “worst ever” while he was Commander in Chief. And, there seem to be at least as many who are willing to sum up President Obama’s record before the facts can be written as well. Time will tell and by then partisans like Mr. Anderson will be trying to creatively interpret the historical record of some other politician long before it has been written.
We have a long way to travel before the 2012 election. I, for one, am going to do my best to recognize the difference between what is fact and what is a half-truth partisan absolute. I hope most of my fellow voters will do the same.
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This entry was first published as a Des Moines Register blog entry.
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