This morning Jerome Armstrong made a bold claim on the front page of MyDD. In a piece entitled Obama Spent $1.3 Million, plus change, in Florida, Jerome cited this quote:
Hillary Clinton and Obama each spent about $130,000 in Michigan while Obama spent $1.3 million in Florida--more than any other Democratic candidate and more than eight Republican candidates, who were eligible to win delegates from the state.
and made this claim:
That, from the Center for Responsive Politics. I realize that it's still going to be a fight to make the Democratic Party convention a 50-state event, rather than the 48-state event that some want it to be, but this puts to rest the notion that Obama didn't campaign in Florida.
I wrote to Massie Ritsch at the Center for Responsive Politics this morning to ask him for a clarification of the accuracy of Jerome's claim.
Printed below is what, with his permission, he wrote back to me...
Here's the text of the email Massie Ritsch sent to me regarding Jerome Armstrong's claim published with his permission {Emphasis mine.}:
Paul,The information from the Center for Responsive Politics that Jerome Armstrong cites comes from our Feb. 5 analysis of the candidates' year-end campaign finance reports; it's not something we posted today. He also conveniently left out this disclaimer from that same item of ours: "Now would be a good time to mention that measuring spending in a state is problematic. The biggest expenses--advertising, for one--are often spent with vendors outside the state, or even just over the state line. These figures measure only what was spent on the ground with local companies and individuals."
To explain further, the expenditures figures Jerome cited are calculated by looking only at the addresses of the vendors that each campaign paid. They are almost certainly not accurate counts of how much was spent in a state. It's possible that Obama hired a vendor based in Florida who did work outside the state for his campaign. For example, maybe the printer of his signs is in Florida. The amount of money spent on signs would appear in the campaign finance reports to have been focused solely on Florida, when, in fact, the signs were used to campaign all over the country.
Bottom line: I wouldn't use state spending totals gleaned from campaign finance reports to saw anything authoritative about a candidate's effort in a particular state. The FEC's requirements for reporting expenditures just don't allow for that sort of precision.
Feel free to share what I've told you with the blogosphere. And thanks for your question.
Massie Ritsch
Center for Responsive Politics
Jerome Armstrong and MyDD, in my view, owe the Obama campaign a retraction of the claim made in that piece. The claim that Obama spent $1.3M campaigning in Florida is unsupported in the material Jerome cites and, further, the bold claim Jerome makes is directly refuted by Massie Ritsch in a "for attribution" email from the Center for Responsive Politics itself.
We in the netroots have a responsibility to accurately report the facts as we know them and to source our arguments properly. Unfortunately, Jerome's claim is not only unsupported by the material he cites; his cite warns explicitly about drawing the very conclusion he makes.
Jerome owes his readers and the Obama campaign a retraction and a correction. (And I think that should include changing the title of that piece and putting a correction within it so that google searches and cites back to that MyDD piece show the corrected record.)
For myself, neither Jerome's post nor Ritsch's willingness to issue a forthright rebuttal came as a particular surprise. That seems to be, for better or for worse, where we are at this primary season. Truth and accuracy, however, matter. Being a straight shooter is important. Being reality-based is part of what sets our netroots movement apart from politics as usual and the status quo.
Thanks for reading.
k/o
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