Taxes were the Dole message last week, and Bob Dole began with a speech about his tax plan, a speech he had carefully vetted in the days before he flew to Detroit to deliver it. The final draft was handed to him on the plane Monday morning, and Dole — who is very concerned that the numbers he uses in his speeches be sound and immune to cheap attack — immediately spotted a factoid in the speech he had never seen before. The factoid claimed that the new taxes Bill Clinton has been advocating would cost the treasury $ 188 billion. Previously, the Dole campaign had been saying that the tax hikes would total some $ 63 billion.
Dole was irritated, and nervous; he wanted to know who was responsible for fiddling with a text he had approved and changing numbers he had understood. Frantic phone calls from the plane to Dole HQ in Washington ensued; the author of the new factoid turned out to be James Cicconi, a James Baker protege and Bush White House aide, who stuck it in at the last minute without telling anyone. Cicconi was using numbers from the Joint Economic Committee — numbers that did not take into account, as the Dole campaign previously had, Clinton’s proposed targeted tax cuts, which reduce the size of his tax increase from $ 188 billion to $ 63 billion.
The fact that the plane went into a frenzy and that the speech reverted to the more scrupulously fair number stands in staggering contrast to the Clinton campaign, which is still throwing around fake numbers like “100,000 new cops on the street” and “12 million people have used the Family and Medical Leave Act” even though they have been proved false time and again.
