Before even having a chance to read Paul Krugman’s latest column “Don’t Prettify our History,” I read Patterico’s assessment of it so I knew that it would be a doozy, even for Krugman:

If this were the only thing I had ever read by Paul Krugman, it would be enough to conclude that this man has absolutely no regard for the facts. His latest column is a disgrace, and he owes readers an immediate apology for his slipshod and dishonest work.

In this latest piece, Krugman is rehashing the argument that 2000 election that brought Bush into power would have gone to Gore if “undervotes” (those that didn’t register at all) were recounted using different standards. Krugman claims that in 2 out of 3 hypothetical counts Gore would have won. Furthermore, of the one recount that wouldn’t have gone to Mr. Gore it applied a standard that almost certainly would have not been used since it went against Florida law regarding counting such ballots.

As with most Krugman columns, once they are posted, you can almost here some mythical voice go out to the blogosphere, “Okay, who wants to debunk this one?”

This time the honor went to The American Thinker, who does a very detailed critique of the column in the aptly named “More Baloney From Krugman.” American Thinker even hypothesizes that the purpose of the article was for Krugman to rehabilitate himself since someone high up at the New York Times must have gotten concerned about how far from the truth Krugman was straying.

There is one aspect of Krugman’s article which is worth reading:  what would have happened had the US Supreme Court not intervened, and stopped the manual recount of the undervote going on statewide? Krugman concedes that George Bush would have still been declared the winner. As the American Thinker states:

(One) really need not go any further than this. It is the only useful and completely truthful item in this column and by far the most important. For five years, the left and the Democratic Party have been screaming that the Supreme Court awarded the Presidency to George Bush.  Here, the leader of the howling lefty pack, says this is not so.

However, Krugman simply could not leave the truth alone and made the “2 out of 3 hypothetical recounts would have gone to Gore” statement mentioned above. Not surprisingly, Krugman’s results, analysis and statements are all wrong.

First, the Herald did four tests, not three. Bush won three of them, including by 1,665 votes (his official margin in Florida was 537 votes)

Second, only one of the four tests that Gore won was using a standard of only counting ballots in which the intent was indisputable, and here Gore wins by 3 votes. This is the test that Krugman claimed was unrealistic!

Third,  nobody – not Bush, not Gore, not any court in Florida – ever requested a recount of the overvote, so who cares what it shows?  American Thinker challenged Krugman to find any states that manually recount overvotes in close elections.

For those interested in a more thorough debunking of the Krugman column you will need to go to American Thinker’s post. Suffice to say, Krugman has finally stated (perhaps unwittingly, perhaps under-duress by the editorial staff at the NYT that insist on at least 25% truthfulness in his columns) that the 2000 election was not “stolen” by the Supreme Court. And it only took four years for him to say it.

Additional reading:

• “That hissing sound you hear is Paul Krugman running out of ways to denegrate the economy”
• “Paul Krugman on why everyone who doesn’t agree with him is disingenuous”
• “Paul Krugman unplugged”
• “Numbers Don’t Lie but Statisics Do: Why Paul Krugman’s “Dropout Puzzle” Is So Wrong”
• “Krugman’s French Connection is Really Les Miserables”

technorati: krugman paul krugman New York Times gore

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 23rd, 2005 at 8:04 am by Insider and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.