Sorting Truth From Campaign Fiction

Giuliani has repeated questionable claims on the campaign trail and in his advertisements. A case in point was his assertion in October that his chances of surviving prostate cancer were twice as high in the United States as in Britain "under socialized medicine." He defended the statement as "absolutely accurate," even though his campaign was unable to produce a single peer-reviewed cancer researcher or epidemiologist who agreed with him.

Giuliani took a beating in many media outlets, but that may have been less of a concern for him than for some other candidates, particularly the Democrats. The former New York mayor frequently draws applause from conservative audiences by citing attacks on his record from the New York Times.

Democratic candidates, meanwhile, have reacted to similar challenges by ignoring them as best they can. The Obama campaign did not respond when The Washington Post cited data from the U.S. Census and the Bureau of Justice Statistics to challenge the candidate's statistics on the number of young black men in prison and in college at an NAACP forum in July. The campaign made no effort to provide supporting data when Obama repeated the claim on Nov. 29 at a fundraiser in Harlem.

Obama campaign officials declined to comment yesterday.

Many campaign fibs fall into the category of half-truths. Highly selective representation of the facts has become a staple of politics. By using data selectively and playing with language, candidates can reach diametrically opposite conclusions.

According to Giuliani, for instance, taxes went up in Massachusetts while Romney was governor. Romney insists that they went down. Romney claims that New York City spending increased during the eight years that Giuliani was mayor. Giuliani says it decreased.

Sorting out who is telling the truth is often a matter of getting the candidates to be more precise. Giuliani's claim that spending declined in New York refers to per capita spending rather than overall spending. When Romney says he lowered taxes in Massachusetts, he is referring to three or four very narrow tax cuts. He raised corporate taxes and various miscellaneous state fees.

Setting the record straight on such matters takes time and effort. Days, sometimes weeks, can pass before a falsehood is rectified, and it may be difficult to change voters' initial impressions. "It is easy to get the spin out, but it takes longer to get the facts out," said Gehrke, at the DNC.

Jamieson, the Pennsylvania professor, believes that candidates are being held accountable more quickly than ever. She cites an example from the 2000 campaign, when Al Gore misrepresented the position of his Democratic rival Bill Bradley on flood relief for farmers two weeks before the Iowa caucuses. The first substantive media critiques of Gore for exaggeration did not appear until after Bradley was roundly defeated in Iowa and his candidacy was effectively crippled.

The process of spotting and correcting mistakes can still vary greatly. As far back as 1978, the Boston Herald quoted Romney as saying that "my father and I marched" with King. The most recent reiteration of the quote was on Dec. 6, but it was not until Dec. 21 that Romney's description of the episode was first challenged by the Boston Phoenix.

Giuliani had been making his prostate cancer and "socialized medicine" claim for weeks on the campaign trail without being challenged. It was not until he turned it into a radio advertisement on Oct. 29 that several media organizations, including The Post, began examining the assertion more closely.

The pressure of responding to attacks is unusually intense this election cycle because of the number of plausible contenders in both major political parties.

"It's become a multifront war," said David Bossie, president of the conservative advocacy group Citizens United. "Candidate A attacks candidate B, but then C and D pile on. You have to be on your toes at all times."

Campaign finance records show that the candidates have spent more than $110,000 on subscriptions to the LexisNexis family of databases over the past year. Most of the leading candidates employ half a dozen researchers, who comb the records of their competitors for the smallest mistake. All the campaigns are constantly shoveling out "fact checks" pointing out the errors of rivals.

Opposition research has been a staple of political campaigns for decades, but the Internet has made it easier to disseminate the information. Video of embarrassing moments collected by rival campaigns is routinely distributed on YouTube. When the Democratic National Committee in November unveiled FlipperTV, a Web site devoted to tracking video from Republican political events, it got 60,000 hits on the first day.

Despite the increased risk of getting caught, mistakes, exaggerations and fibs are still plentiful. "Political candidates have been misleading voters for more than 2,000 years," said Jackson, the Annenberg fact checker.

For daily truth-squadding of the presidential campaign, visit washingtonpost.com/factchecker.