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Posted
Monday, November 05, 2007 6:57 PM
| By
Christopher Beam
First, Dr. David Gratzer, the author of the City
Journal article Giuliani drew the numbers from and an adviser to the
Giuliani campaign, acknowledged
that they were outdated and “crude.” Then his
source for the numbers, a health research organization called The Commonwealth
Fund, accused Gratzer of misusing the data. In other words, no one was willing
to stand behind the numbers. Both the Washington
Post’s Fact Checker and PolitiFact.com, two watchdogs for the lies, damned
lies, and statistics of the 2008 presidential candidates, roundly rejected
Rudy’s statement.
At the time, the Giuliani campaign itself issued a
not-quite-defense of the statistic: “The citation is an article in a highly respected
intellectual journal written by an expert at a highly respected think tank
which the mayor read because he is an intellectually engaged human being.” But
on Friday, Giuliani reiterated his support for the numbers as “absolutely
accurate,” if a little dated: “Even if you want to quibble about
the statistics, you find me the person who leaves the United States and goes to England for prostate cancer
treatment, and I'd like to meet that person,” he said.
Rudy does have defenders other than himself. The Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner argues in National Review today that Giuliani’s
numbers are problematic, but that his overall point stands. “Beyond
the debate over numerical minutiae,” Tanner writes, “the basic fact is that Britain’s
system of socialized medicine is bad for your health.”
But then why use such murky numbers? As Tanner himself notes, the stats on non-prostate cancers support his point much better. It
illustrates a larger point about Giuliani that Slate’s John Dickerson
has made before: that his greatest strength is his willingness to make highly questionable statements with
utter conviction. It’s an approach that has gotten Rudy in trouble before,
like when he said he’d pay for tax cuts with
more tax cuts. But getting in trouble with fact-checkers is different from
getting in trouble with Republican voters. From the perspective of the polls, what
he says seems less important than how loudly and how often he says it.