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August 21, 2005
Krugman's Big Lie
By Richard Baehr
Paul Krugman, the former Enron advisor, New York Times op ed columnist, and presumably in his spare time, educator at Princeton, has made a habit of distortion, and half truths in his twice-weekly columns in the paper of record. Several website have sprung up to deconstruct each Krugman column,and others respond to specific errors, which are routine. But Krugman's column on Friday, August 19 marks a remarkable descent into outright dishonesty, a new low. What is most astounding is that the dishonesty involves Krugman's deliberately mistaken interpretration of a study in which his own paper, the New York Times, was a participant, and from which the Times ' reporters drew entirely different conclusions from those which Krugman trumpeted in his article.
Krugman's dishonesty involves the results of the Florida vote in the Presidential election in 2000. In his column titled: What They Did Last Fall, Krugman says the following about the 2000 race:
Two different news media consortiums reviewed Florida's ballots; both found that a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore.
Quite simply, his statement is false. It is a lie.
Both major consortiums undertook to count all the disputed votes (the so-called undercount) in a variety of ways. This was because different counties had used different methods for counting or not counting hanging chads, or partially punched ballots during the Florida recount. The consortium wanted to see if using one methodology as opposed to another would have produced a different result. So they tested a liberal counting of all partially punched ballots statewide. They considered a tougher standard requiring ballots to be completely punched through to be counted. They considered standards in between these two. The heterogeneity in the post election counting methodologies used by different county officials, was the major reason the Supreme Court by a 7 to 2 majority vote (including votes by liberal justices Souter and Breyer) concluded that the process as established by the Florida Supreme Court (which provided no systematic methodology to be used in the statewide recount of the undervote) was badly flawed and broken, and would result in a denial of the equal protection of the law to voters in different counties in Florida.
When the two newspaper consortia concluded their surveys, their conclusions were identical: by almost every method selected to count the undervote, had all the ballots been counted statewide, Bush would have won, and not Gore. There were a few methodologies that would have produced a very narrow Gore victory, but the great majority of the different approaches produced a Bush win.
If the methodology that Gore advocates had pushed on the Florida Supreme Court been adopted, it would have resulted in a Bush victory. In no case, can one make the assertion that Krugman does, that the consortia simply concluded Gore would have won, absent a deliberate attempt to distort the results of the studies undertaken by the newspaper consortia.
If one goes back to the headlines in the newspapers that participated in the consortium studies, they all indicated that Bush would have won under almost all the counting methodologies. In light of this, the statement by Krugman
that a full manual recount would have given the election to Gore
is false. It is in fact a deliberate lie by a propagandist for the left, an individual not remotely concerned with truth, regardless of what his newspaper employer or university employer might hold out as a standard of behavior....
