Conservative Wordsmith Susan Baldwin writes: Mitt Romney and Democrats have recently been accusing Rudy Giuliani about his habitual problem of incorrectly citing various pertinent statistics related to his being Mayor of New York City and other personal viewpoints.

According to an article in the New York Times, "Discussing his crime-fighting success as mayor, Mr. Giuliani told a television interviewer that New York was 'the only city in America that has reduced crime every single year since 1994.' In New Hampshire this week, he told a public forum that when he became mayor in 1994, New York 'had been averaging like 1,800, 1,900 murders for almost 30 years.' When a recent Republican debate turned to the question of fiscal responsibility, he boasted that 'under me, spending went down by 7 percent.'"

"All of these statements are incomplete, exaggerated or just plain wrong. And while, to be sure, all candidates use misleading statistics from time to time, Mr. Giuliani has made statistics a central part of his candidacy as he campaigns on his record."

"For instance, another major American city claims to have reduced crime every year since 1994: Chicago. New York averaged 1,514 murders a year during the three decades before Mr. Giuliani took office; it did not record more than 1,800 homicides until 1980. And Mr. Giuliani’s own memoir states that spending grew an average of 3.7 percent for most of his tenure; an aide said Mr. Giuliani had meant to say that he had proposed a 7 percent reduction in per capita spending during his time as mayor."

"But in recent days, both Mr. Giuliani’s Republican rival Mitt Romney and Democrats have accused him of a pattern of misleading figures and have begun to use the issue to try to undercut his credibility."

"An examination of many of his statements by The New York Times, other news organizations and independent groups have turned up a variety of misstatements, virtually all of which cast Mr. Giuliani or his arguments in a better light. 'He’s given us a lot of work up until now,' said Brooks Jackson, the director of Annenberg Political Fact Check, which is part of Factcheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania that has corrected statements by candidates in both parties."

"Even some people who support Mr. Giuliani’s proposals say he risks undercutting his own arguments when he relies on imprecise or questionable statistics."

"In a recent radio advertisement by the campaign about his health care proposal, Mr. Giuliani repeated another false statement that he had been using on the campaign trail. In the advertisement Mr. Giuliani, who has had prostate cancer, asserted that his chances of surviving prostate cancer in the United States were 82 percent, while his chance of surviving in England would have been only 44 percent. His point was that the American health care system is far superior to England’s government-run system, which he refers to as “socialized medicine."

"The figure came from an article written by one of Mr. Giuliani’s health care advisers, but was soon discredited: the source of the research that was used to derive the statistic said that its data had been misused. The Office for National Statistics in Britain said that the true five-year survival rate was 74.4 percent — still lower than in the United States, but by a much smaller margin. Mr. Giuliani stood by the statistic, however, and kept using the advertisement, though it has since gone off the air."

"Last weekend, questions about Mr. Giuliani’s use of facts moved front and center in the campaign. Mr. Giuliani charged that 'violent crime and murder went up' in Massachusetts while Mr. Romney was governor. The number of reported killings did go up in those years, but the state’s overall rate of violent crime went down, according to statistics compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation."*

"Mr. Romney accused Mr. Giuliani of having 'a real problem with facts,' and aides circulated a statement calling Mr. Giuliani’s crime statistics 'about as accurate as his prostate cancer survival numbers for England.'"

"'He has now done this time and again, making up facts that just happen to be wrong, and facts are stubborn things,' Mr. Romney said."

Thanks to MICHAEL COOPER for the above excerpts from his excellent article,  
Citing Statistics, Giuliani Misses Time and Again, Published: November 30, 2007. Please click this link to read the entire article.

I don't know about you, but I want an honest person in the White House. Rudy Giuliani now apparently has yet another liberal value, besides his pro-choice and pro-gay viewpoints – Rudy Giuliani’s facts sound more like myths. America doesn't need a mythmaker for president. I would like to give American people the benefit of the doubt by saying that perhaps a greater percentage of Americans care more about the truth than one might think. 

If you're looking for honesty as a good quality in our next president, you need not look further than Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. At least he is not afraid to admit the truth when he has made a mistake. Mitt Romney does not seem to suffer from "making up facts that just happen to be wrong," as Mitt so aptly said when referring to Rudy Giuliani. Facts are facts, and fiction is fiction. Please, Mayor Giuliani, let's not confuse the two any longer.

Related Links

http://www.mittromney.com/

http://www.mittromney.com/
Ann-Romney/index 

http://www.evangelicalsformitt.org/ 

http://www.mittreport.com/ 

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The original date of this post was
November 30, 2007. 

Conservative Wordsmith Susan Baldwin, author of the Conservative Wordsmith Weblog, appreciates your thoughts and comments.