Triangulator

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• Barry Yeoman
• Keenan Steiner, staff writer with the Sunlight Foundation

When I learned that Americans for Prosperity was hosting a cocktail party honoring Art Pope and David Koch during the Republican National Convention, it seemed like a natural event for me to cover. I used to write about Pope for the Independent, back when he was a state legislator from Raleigh and often the smartest (and nerdiest) Republican in the room.

Since then, Pope has made a national name for himself by working committedly to move the American political landscape to the right. Along with his family and its organizations, Pope has spent tens of millions of dollars on conservative causes, including efforts to weaken unions, relax environmental standards, and fight limits on campaign spending.

Pope has been credited with engineering the GOP takeover of the North Carolina General Assembly in 2010. As the Independent Weekly and the Durham-based Institute for Southern Studies have documented, this was accomplished in large part by attack-ad blitzes in a handful of key districts.

Republicans now control both chambers of the legislature for the first time since 1870. This new majority is responsible for the anti-gay Amendment 1, attacks on sea-level science, deep cuts to public education, and a green light for fracking.

But Pope’s national visibility comes primarily from his chairmanship of Americans for Prosperity (AFP), a nonprofit that advocates for deregulation, low taxes and cuts in government spending. Co-founded by David Koch, an oil billionaire, APF is often cited as the behemoth behind the tea party movement. Pope and Koch are friends, and this week they were both delegates at the Republican convention in Tampa.

Yesterday’s reception was free and open to the public. Advance registration was required. Before the convention, I registered online. I heard nothing back. Figuring my name was probably on someone’s list, I decided to show up.

I wasn’t, in fact, on anyone’s list.

Nor was I alone. Arriving at the same time was Keenan Steiner, a staff writer with the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes transparency in government information. Steiner was hoping that attending the event would offer a rare glimpse of Koch in action.

“He’s the most important individual behind the Republican outside-money machine,” Steiner told me. “He and his friends are pledging to raise $400 million to help elect Republicans. He’s very secretive with the media. The public knows very little about him.”

Knowing who has access to Koch during the convention is important, the writer said: “Journalists should be interested in following him wherever he’s going.”

Steiner had successfully registered for the reception as a member of the public. The invitation was rescinded after he wrote an Aug. 17 blog post about AFP’s plans to spend $25 million on a media campaign criticizing President Obama. Steiner reported that AFP had spent $6.4 million in a single week’s advertising, including $741,030 in North Carolina. He based this on a document AFP filed with the Federal Election Commission, then amended five days later with the state-by-state details deleted. Steiner wrote that AFP had “accidentally” filed an initial document that was more specific than the law required.

After he posted his article, Steiner received a message from AFP’s director of public affairs, Levi Russell, rescinding his invitation. “Based on recent experience,“ Russell wrote, “you’re willing to write articles that are filled with inaccuracies, and not interested in making corrections.” Contrary to the blog post, Russell insisted, the initial filing was not a mistake.

Russell told Steiner to reapply as a reporter. His application was not approved.

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• Bob Palisin

In 2009, I was researching an article for AARP The Magazine about the impact of factory closings on older employers. Traveling around the country, I talked with unemployed workers who had skimped on food, lost health insurance, even suffered strokes because of the stress. During that time I kept a thick file of newspaper clippings, including stories about the 2008 closure of a General Motors plant in Janesville, Wis., that threw 4,000 people (including those who worked for suppliers) out of work. The New York Times interviewed one 24-year employee, Andy Richardson, who planned to move away to find a job, leaving his wife and daughters behind in Janesville. “I’ll miss my family,” he said, crying.

Manufacturing jobs were already hemorrhaging at the end of the Bush administration, when the Janesville plant was a poignant symbol. That’s why I took a doubletake when I heard GOP vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan place the blame for the Wisconsin closure on President Obama.

“A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant,” Ryan said in his acceptance speech at last night’s session of the Republican National Convention. “Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said, ‘I believe that if our government is there to support you, this plant will be here for another 100 years.’ That’s what he said in 2008. Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day. And that’s how it is in so many towns where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight.”

I watched Ryan’s speech from the seats where North Carolina’s alternate delegates were sitting. They were cheering and waving signs, more energized than I had seen them this week. “Electric,” said Vinnie DeBenedetto, a real-estate broker and former town council member from the Wake County suburb of Holly Springs. “It was just captivating. He hit the heart and soul of the delegates and guests. I think he’s the future of the Republican Party.”

“Paul Ryan’s speech was awesome. Paul Ryan is awesome,” said Zan Bunn, a computer consultant from Cary.

By the time I got back to my hotel, the Internet was buzzing about the speech. The nonpartisan fact-checking site PolitiFact, run by the Tampa Bay Times, had caught the inaccuracy about the Janesville plant—but there was more. I reviewed both PolitiFact and FactCheck.org, a project of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center. I also read analyses by major news organizations such as the Associated Press and Washington Post. It turns out Ryan’s speech was studded with errors. Even Fox News called it “an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a political speech.”

Among them:

• Ryan said that Obama’s health-care reform law “funneled” $716 billion from Medicare services: “The biggest, coldest power play of all in Obamacare came at the expense of the elderly.” In fact, notes the National Journal, none of the cuts come from benefits. What’s more, the Affordable Care Act makes it easier for seniors to afford preventive health services and prescription drugs. FactCheck.org quotes Medicare’s chief actuary as saying the reform law “substantially improves” the system’s finances. Besides, Ryan supported those cuts too.


• Ryan blamed Obama for last year’s downgrade of the United States’ credit rating. In reality, the rating agency Standard & Poor’s faulted both major parties for creating a political environment that was “contentious and fitful.” At the time, congressional Republicans were refusing to raise the country’s debt ceiling unless Democrats slashed social programs and investments. Ryan told CNBC then that he believed “lots of bond traders [and] economists” would accept a default of “a day or two or three or four.”


• Ryan said household incomes increased in Massachusetts when Mitt Romney was governor. In real dollars, they went down, according to PolitiFact.


• The candidate chastised Obama for failing to follow up on the “urgent report” of a bipartisan debt-reduction commission. That’s true. But Ryan neglected to mention that he had sat on that commission and voted against the recommendations. So did all the panel’s Republicans.


• Like many convention speakers, Ryan referred disparagingly to Obama’s “you didn’t build that” comment. “At the corner shops in our towns and cities, the restaurants, cleaners, gyms, hair salons, hardware stores—these didn’t come out of nowhere,” Ryan said. “A lot of heart goes into each one … After all that work, and in a bad economy, it sure doesn’t help to hear from their president that government gets the credit. What they deserve to hear is the truth. Yes, you did build that.”

Obama’s quote has been the bull’s-eye of this convention—the president has been characterized repeatedly as trying to snatch credit from small business people. But PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, and The Washington Post’s The Fact Check all agree: When Obama said “that,” he was referring to infrastructure like roads and bridges that help support businesses. The president was advocating for more taxes on the wealthy to pay for these public investments. “We succeed because of our individual initiative,” Obama said in that July speech in Roanoke, Va., “but also because we do things together.” The biggest problem with Obama’s statement was its mangled grammar.
“Facts matter,” wrote National Journal’s editor-in-chief, Ron Fournier, last night. When it comes to budget matters, “Ryan ignored them and thus loses moral authority on his signature issue.”

When I arrived at the North Carolina delegation’s breakfast this morning, there was still considerable buzz around Ryan’s speech. I sat down next to Bob Palisin, a retired Presbyterian minister and former congressional candidate from Concord, near Charlotte. He was wearing his trademark green-and-red plaid jacket and a button with a Republican elephant and a Democratic donkey. “This is your brain,” it said next to the elephant. Alongside the donkey it said, “This is your brain on drugs.” Around his hat was a yellow paper band that said, “Ponzibamus Destruerus,” faux Latin for “Obamacare must be destroyed.”

He was excited about the speech. “It shows a bringing-back into the party, a youthful transition,” he said.

I told him about the factual errors. He was skeptical. “I know different fact-check groups have their own biases,” he said. “Various fact-check groups themselves should be fact-checked. I do not believe all fact-check groups are equal.”

I explained that the sites I had consulted were nonpartisan.

“I’m a history major, so I look into facts myself, rather than what you get from fact-check reports.”

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• Barry Yeoman
• North Carolina delegate Richard Littiken

I’ve covered national political party conventions since 1980. I know how amped-up the rhetoric can get on both sides. But I have never heard so much fear of an incumbent as I’ve witnessed during this week’s Republican National Convention.

“Every election we hear that this is the most important election in our lifetime,” Sharon Day, who co-chairs the Republican National Committee, told delegates last night. “This election is more than that. It is the most important election in our nation’s lifetime.”

She compared GOP activists to the United States’ Founding Fathers: “What they started, what they believed in, we must defend.”

At breakfast this morning, David Rouzer, a state senator and congressional candidate from Johnston County, warned the North Carolina delegation, “The United States is turning toward socialism. We’re not going to let that happen.”

In one-on-one conversations, party activists describe the prospect of President Obama’s reelection in apocalyptic terms, predicting something approaching doom.

Trying to understand the roots of that fear, I’ve been asking North Carolina Republicans how they imagine a second Obama term would play out. Nobody put it more starkly than Richard Littiken, a delegate from Sanford, 35 miles south of Chapel Hill, and the vice president of a family-run heating and air-conditioning company. I had been following the 43-year-old Littiken on Twitter (@Pyr8Pyr8), reading about his recent support for Pussy Riot, school vouchers and Todd Akin. (The latter is striking because Littiken is pro-choice. “But I definitely believe that the media people jumped on him in an effort to put forth their preferred candidate,” he said.)

So what does Littiken fear from four more years of an Obama presidency?

In short: He believes he will die prematurely if the president wins. And he fears he’ll be stripped of the weapons he might need to help wage an armed revolution.

Littiken has a type of cancer called medullary thyroid carcinoma. He describes it as “terminal.” Doctors have told him there are limited medical treatments. “So the idea of Obamacare, a fairly controlled medical bureaucracy, is absolutely frightening,” he told me.

It’s worth noting that the Affordable Care Act—which places tougher rules on insurance companies and provides for small-business tax credits, rebates for seniors to buy prescription drugs, and permission for states to expand Medicaid if they choose—does not create a government-run health-care system. (There’s also considerable academic contention about whether national systems fare worse than our own when it comes to cancer care.) But Littiken nonetheless worries about stories he has heard. “I met a lady in D.C. who had breast cancer,” he said. “She’s from Canada. She had to come to America to get treatment because she would have had to wait so long that she would have been dead by the time she received treatment in Canada.”

According to a 2011 study by the non-profit Canada Institute for Health Information, 98 percent of residents who need radiation for cancer receive it within a clinically appropriate time frame.

Still, this is not about statistics for Littiken; it’s about his greater sense—a sense that many Republicans have expressed—that Obama doesn’t care about his welfare. Sarah Palin’s “death panels,” a distortion of the president’s vision for more deliberative end-of-life care, nonetheless maintains a hold on many conservatives.

Littiken told me that Obama once told a voter that perhaps her 105-year-old mother should be euthanized with a pill rather receiving a pacemaker. That comment, Littiken worries, portends what would happen to him. “He would kill me off,” the delegate says of Obama. “I wouldn’t be treated, so he’d basically kill me off sooner. That got me pretty fired up.”

The story, if true, would have been horrifying, so I decided to fact-check it. The woman is real; he name is Jane Sturm. During an ABC News broadcast, she asked Obama whether priority could be given to patients like her mother who displayed “a certain joy of living.”

“I don’t think we can make judgments based on people’s spirit,” the president responded. “That would be a pretty subjective decision.” He stressed that end-of-life decisions are difficult. “I don’t want bureaucracies making those decisions,” he said, and stressed that the current system sometimes does that by default. “We often make these decisions by just letting people run out of money or making the deductibles so high or the out-of-pocket expenses so onerous that they just can’t afford the care.”

Obama told Sturm that patients, families, and physicians need to make more informed choices: “At least we can let doctors know and your mom know that, you know what? Maybe this isn’t going to help. Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller.”