Marco Rubio has something in common with his Republican primary opponent Ted Cruz: They’re both getting poor marks in media “fact checks” that seem more about point of view than points of data.
Not long after the Florida senator announced this week that he would run for president in 2016, the Associated Press targeted his speech for a “fact check.” The AP’s review, titled “FACT CHECK: Rubio Rhetoric Breaks With Past, but Ideas Don’t,” scrutinizes some of the Florida senator’s lighter rhetorical flourishes
The Republican lawmaker received a mostly failing grade from AP.
Rubio said when he announced his White House bid that, “Too many of our leaders and their ideas are stuck in the 20th century.”
The AP took exception to this.
“On foreign policy, taxes and government spending, many of Rubio’s policies are rooted in Republican positions from the 1990s or even earlier,” the AP reported.
Elsewhere, the AP dinged Rubio’s entitlement reform plan, noting that the senator’s proposed future initiatives have their roots in past policies.
“Rubio is also calling for sweeping changes to entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security to control government spending,” the AP reported. “While the push for ‘premium supports’ to control Medicare costs was born this century, pieces of Rubio’s plans to change Social Security are decades old.”
“Specifically, Rubio would repeal the ‘earnings test’ for anyone who claims Social Security before full retirement age but keeps working,” it added.
Elsewhere, the AP was unimpressed with Rubio’s saying, “Our leaders put us at a disadvantage by taxing, borrowing and regulating like it’s 1999.”
The AP responded by reporting, “While Rubio was surely trying to have fun with a popular Prince song, he’s wrong to liken the government’s current taxing and borrowing to that of 1999.”
The AP wasn’t the only group to take exception to the Florida senator’s cheeky reference to Prince: PoltiFact also dinged Rubio for his supposedly “bad analogy.” Both noted that in Bill Clinton’s second term, the federal government was in fact running a surplus — which was subsequently wiped out amid the exploding budget deficits of the Bush and Obama administrations.
Rubio isn’t the only 2016 presidential hopeful to fall under the scrutiny of media fact checkers. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, actually griped about this exact topic in an interview with CNBC.
“There is a game that is played by left-wing editorial writers. It’s this new species of yellow journalism called PolitiFact,” Cruz said in reference to the fact-checking group flunking him for saying as part of a joke that there are 125,000 IRS agents.
Cruz’s joke that all IRS agents should be sent to the border was immediately given a flunking grade by factcheck.org.
There are currently 25,000 agents working for the IRS, which employs somewhere around 90,000 people total, according to the most recent federal statistics.
“Colloquially I was referring to all the employees as agents. That particular stat is in a joke I used. So, they’re literally fact-checking a joke. I say that explicitly tongue-in-cheek,” Cruz told CNBC.
Elsewhere, Cruz was given poor marks for accurately saying in a speech that the U.S. tax code has more words than the Bible.
“This is a nonsense fact, something that is technically correct but ultimately meaningless,” the Post said of Cruz’s remarks in its “Pinocchio Test” ruling.
“Cruz makes the point that tax policies need to be drastically simplified, and many Americans likely would support that sentiment,” the post said, ruling that Cruz is deserving of neither a passing nor a flunking grade. “But such a crude comparison, which provides no nuance or context, doesn’t capture why the tax code has become so complex and how it affects taxpayers.”
