Good Monday morning Fellow Seekers of Wisdom and Truth,

The New York Times had a good tough piece Saturday about a half-truth that Rudy Giuliani has been perpetrating throughout the presidential campaign so far.  It comes down to this:

Giuliani, who is running hard as a fiscal conservative, consistently claims — most recently in a radio ad now running in Iowa – to have turned a multi-billion-dollar deficit into a multi-billion-dollar surplus during his tenure as mayor of New York.

In reality, the deficit that Giuliani’s successor, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, faced during his first year, was larger than the deficit Giuliani inherited when he took office.

Without lying, Giuliani consistently gives the opposite, false impression, as for example, in this excerpt from an interview on the May 13, 2007, edition of “FOX News Sunday With Chris Wallace:”

WALLACE: “On the campaign trail, you talk about being a fiscal conservative, the fact that you cut taxes 23 times, that you reduced welfare rolls, I think, by 600,000 people.

But independent budget reviews say that spending went up $9 billion during your time as mayor and that, in fact, there were 6,000 more city workers at the end of your two terms than there were at the beginning. Question: Fiscal conservative?”

GIULIANI: “Sure, big time. Compare that to other states and the federal government during that period of time, and it was about the lowest growth in government. It was below inflation and the growth of the economy. It was about the only government that was able to accomplish that…

I took a deficit of $2.3 billion and turned it into a multibillion-dollar surplus…”

That’s the key oversimplification. It’s true that New York was running a deficit when Giuliani took office, and that there was a multibillion surplus at one point during the Giuliani era, helped by the booming stock market and strong economy of the late 90s. But when the economy cooled off, the surplus disappeared. Sept. 11 also delivered a severe blow to the New York economy and the municipal budget. But before Sept. 11, the Giuliani administration was already projecting a multi-billion-dollar deficit for the year ahead.

According to the Times piece:

“The Giuliani campaign defended the advertisement, noting that it merely states that Mr. Giuliani created a multibillion-dollar surplus, not that he passed one on to his successor.”

This is a not a statement you want to make if you give a rip about straight talk. If Giuliani’s had-a-deficit, turned-it-into-a-surplus statement is accurate — if it’s not a distortion to pick self-serving starting and ending points for such a statistical claim — it would be just as accurate for one of Giuliani’s opponents to say that Giuliani turned a multi-billion-dollar surplus into a multi-billion-dollar deficit.

The Times’ Michael Cooper, who did the good work of demonstrating what really happened to the budget during the Giuliani years, calls the turned-a-deficit-into-a-surplus line only “somewhat misleading,” and then attributes even that formulation to unspecified “independent fiscal monitors” (some of whom are quoted later in the story). That’s just journalistic caution. Never say something bluntly and in your own voice if you can help it.

The deception in Giuliani’s ad is mild compared to what’s ahead. These kinds of intentional half-truths are so common in political discourse that you get the feeling we’re not supposed to call fouls on them. But I’m no longer much interested in grading intellectual honesty on the curve.

Nor am I interested in exaggerating Giuliani’s offense against candor. He apparently did win a reputation, especially in his first term, for fiscal discipline and as a tax cutter. Now he wants to make the Bush tax cuts permanent. Fine. He should specify how that will help him get the U.S. debt-and-deficit picture off of its current Titanic-headed-for-the-iceberg course. And so should all the other candidates.