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  Fudge Cycle

  Posted Monday, November 05, 2007 6:57 PM | By Christopher Beam
  Rudy Giuliani seems to have a lot of trouble admitting he messed up. In a radio ad released last week, he said that the chances of surviving cancer “under socialized medicine” in England are 44 percent, compared to 82 percent in the U.S. But those statistics have been strongly disputed.

  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Journal article Giuliani drew the numbers from and an adviser to the Giuliani campaign, acknowledged that they were outdated and “crude.”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.

  Filed under: Rudy Giuliani, Health Care

About Christopher Beam

• Christopher Beam is a Slate political reporter.

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