Rep. Tom Cotton, the Republican nominee in the Arkansas Senate race, is running an ad highlighting his leadership in trying to fix Washington’s broken farm bill legislation. The ad isn’t particularly controversial ormaking false claims, in any discernible way and yet “fact checkers” at the Washington Post and PolitiFact have pretty savagely attacked it. Once again, the fact checkers are wrong on the merits. But more than that, there’s something very fishy about their Cotton critique.
You can watch the whole ad, but here’s the supposedly objectionable claim Cotton makes:
As far as legislative sausage-making goes, there are few spectacles more off-putting than Capitol Hill’s periodic farm bill extravaganza. The farm subsidies are bad enough on their own, but for decades the bill has also included funding for the unrelated Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), aka food stamps. The result is the worst kind of bipartisanship—rural Republicans compromise on bloating the cost of food stamp funding in exchange for Democratic votes to get their farm subsidies.
This unholy union has been in place for decades, and it’s getting out of control. The farm subsidies are clearly excessive, and whereas foodstamps were 55 percent of the cost of the farm bill in 2002, they made up 80 percent of the cost of the bill this year. Furthermore, every time Republicans vote for a pork-filled farm bill they get called hypocrites for claiming to oppose unnecessary handouts.
In 2013, Tom Cotton was among a number of House Republicans who tried to change this sorry state of affairs. They broke the farm bill up into two bills—one for farm subisdies and one for food stamps. Republicans would have to own the cost of their farm subsidies, and Democrats would have to justify the ever-increasing cost of the food stamp program. And taken on their own, there would be no perverse incentive to buy votes to pass a comprehensive farm bill. The House passed a farm bill without the food stamp component in July 2013.
Alas, the Democratic-controlled Senate and the White House did not like the idea of having to justify their out-of-control spending and exerted a great deal of pressure to make sure the sorry farm bill status quo continued. President Obama released a statement condemning the House breaking up the farm bill the day after the House passed a stripped-down version. The White House further released a report in November 2013 titled “The Economic Importance of Passing a Comprehensive Food, Farm and Jobs Bill.” The farm bill that eventually passed in January recombined the food stamps and farm subsidies, and Cotton was one of 63 Republicans who voted against it. As Dan Holler at the Heritage Foundation tells THE WEEKLY STANDARD, “It should come as no surprise that the food stamp reforms are failing and the new farm programs appear to be more costly than projected.”
So what is wrong with Cotton’s ad? Here’s the crux of Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler’s argument:
The most problematic aspect of Cotton’s ad is that he suggests that attaching food stamps to the farm bill was a new idea—something that he was fighting against. But that’s invented history. As we have shown, this “bad idea” has been in place since before Cotton, 37, was born.
The dictionary literalism is already a sign Kessler’s grasping at straws. Cotton is making a case that the farm bill has become overwhelmingly a vehicle for food stamps and is, yes, ripping off taxpayers. I will happily point Kessler to multiple references of using “hijack” in a non-criminal, colloquial sense in the pages of the Washington Post. Yes, this problem predates Obama, but it’s also true that Obama brought the House’s farm bill plans to a screeching halt to ensure that the bill contained billions more in food stamp funding and the legislation was recombined.
If you want to argue Cotton is engaged in hyperbole by using the word “hijack,” fine. But it’s not egregious political rhetoric, and to suggest that Cotton is somehow implying the president acted criminally with regard to how he handled the farm bill is an inference no reasonable person would make.
It is also utterly disingenuous to say Cotton is inventing history. Nowhere in the ad does Cotton talk about the historic evolution of the farm bill. I cannot for the life of me see how he’s suggesting that combining the two farm bills was novel. The ad simply doesn’t suggest that.
In context, the point Cotton is actually making is that he tried to change the status quo by stepping up and exhibiting some leadership on Capitol Hill instead of going along to get along with their longstanding dysfunctional process. And was he a “radical” for doing this? Who cares? What matters is whether or not Cotton was right to try and break up the farm bill, not whether he was a radical. In historical terms, it would have been pretty radical to stand up in the Roman senate and oppose feeding people to lions for popular amusement. This is strictly the realm of opinion, and is a matter for voters to decide, not professional “fact checkers.” The scare quotes around “bad idea” are revealing, as is the fact that Kessler is suddenly justifying the unseemly farm bill process as a matter of hidebound traditionalism rather than on the merits.
And here’s where things start to get really suspect. The Post’s Kessler gives Cotton the full four Pinnochios rating. Then PolitiFact also weighed in with a “pants on fire” rating:
Did you catch what’s fishy about this? Here’s Kessler: “As we have shown, this ‘bad idea’ has been in place since before Cotton, 37, was born.” And here’s PolitiFact: “But the idea of merging the two topics together in one bill hardly came from Obama. It had been that way, uninterrupted, since 1973 — when Obama wasn’t even a teenager yet.” Here’s Kessler: “Is that what Obama did when he said that Congress should continue to do what it did in the past? Or was breaking up the farm bill the more radical step?” Here’s PolitiFact: “One could say that Cotton and his allies in the House, by seeking a farm bill stripped of food stamp provisions, were actually the ones taking a more radical step.” The broad argument of both fact checks is very similar, but it is awfully suspicious that two seperate fact checkers would arrive at such unique — and tendentious! — talking points. It further doesn’t help that Kessler took to twitter to crow about the “unanimous (and critical) fact checker verdict” on the Cotton ad. (For what it’s worth, FactCheck.org also weighed in with a Cotton fack check that falls along similar lines.)
Now PolitiFact has always been nothing but biased and terrible — studies have shown PolitiFact calls Republicans liars over Democrats at a rate of two to one or even three to one. Kessler, on the other hand, has always struck me as generally honest and the best of the major fact checkers. (Comparing him to other fact checkers is clearing a very, very low bar.) Kessler’s saving grace is that he has always been admirably forthcoming to his critics. I emailed him about the similar fact checks and he responded:
Hmm, great minds think alike?
I learned about the Cotton ad from [the Washington Post’s] liberal blogger Greg Sargent, who simply passed it onto me without much comment. (Jen Rubin [thePost’s right-leaning blogger] sends me stuff all the time too.) I had a brief exchange with the Pryor folks, who sent me an article about the history of the food stamp program, but that was it. I actually was planning to post something Monday but then I got a request from an editor to do something on the Nunn campaign and pushed back my Cotton column a day.
In the meantime, PolitiFact did post something ahead of me. I try not to look closely at their columns when they’ve beaten me, though I did see it was rated Pants on Fire. FactCheck.org also did one, after both of us, and came to the same conclusion. While they don’t have an age reference, they make a similar point re radical—“But contrary to the ad’s contention, it was House Republicans who were trying to upend congressional precedent, as farm bills going back four decades have included food stamp funding.”
In any case, no one pitched me or sent me talking points. I had kind of liked my idea of referencing Cotton’s age, but I wouldn’t have used it if I had known PolitiFact had done something on Obama’s age!
I take Kessler at his word when he says there’s nothing intentionally untoward on his part at least. However, Kessler did talk to the Pryor campaign about the history of food stamps—interestingly, the two other fact checkers used the same stat about food stamps growing from 55 to 80 percent of the farm bill.* Moreover, I can’t see why Kessler couldn’t verify the claims of the Cotton ad independently. Interacting with the Pryor campaign wasn’t necessary, beyond them pushing a predjudicial point of view. (Kessler, to his credit, does mention also talking with Cotton’s campaign in his fact check for what that’s worth.**) Kessler was also urged on by partisan Greg Sargent, who has been covering the race from the Democratic side. It’s pretty likely he’s familiar with the latest Pryor campaign talking points. And Kessler also sent a follow-up email:
Kessler’s candor is commendable. But he’s flat wrong. When seperate media outlets are operating on groupthink “90 to 95 percent of time” covering the wide array of complicated policy issues that fact checkers tackle, there’s absolutely no way this is a good thing. Indeed, the farm bill is a case study in how groupthink in politics can go seriously arwry. Indeed, every one of these fact checks attacks Cotton, not by engaging his actual argument, but by pointing out that the farm bill has been passed in this dubious way since 1973. It is certainly revealing that anyone would try to justify the unseemly farm bill process as a matter of hidebound traditionalism rather than on the merits.
Again, I have interacted with him a number of times and I take Kessler on his word that there was no nefarious reason that his fact check ended up so similar to PolitiFact’s. But if you think that fact checkers can agree “90 to 95 percent of time” and it has nothing to do with Democratic campaigns peddling their silly arguments to media “fact checkers” who end up regurgitating them without even really making an effort to hide what they’re doing, well, I suggest you find a fire extinguisher. Your trousers are ablaze.
*Kessler emails to note the Pryor campaign did not send him this statistic.
**I missed that Kessler had talked to Cotton’s campaign in an earlier version of the post.
