Nancy Pelosi Is A Liar

Shocking! And the Washington Post chimes in with the very rare "four Pinocchios."

Nancy Pelosi put out a graph that purported to show that, among the last 5 presidents, Barack Hussein Obama has actually been the most fiscally responsible, a transparently ridiculous claim that only a delusional moron like Nancy Pelosi could possibly believe, which probably explains why MoveOn.org seized on it.

Here's what Politifact found when they ran the numbers. The data are for debt as a percentage of GDP.

 Reagan: Up 14.9 percentage points
George H.W. Bush : Up 7.1 percentage points
Clinton : Down 13.4 percentage points
George W. Bush : Up 5.6 percentage points
Obama : Up 21.9 percentage points (through December 2010 only)

So by this measurement -- potentially a more important one -- Obama is the undisputed debt king of the last five presidents, rather than the guy who added a piddling amount to the debt, as Pelosi’s chart suggested. Of course, all this goes to show that statistics can be used -- and misused -- to bolster almost any argument.


After we presented our research to Pelosi's office, a spokesman acknowledged that the office had erred in assembling and posting the chart and that it was in the process of reposting it. The updated version – which corrects the mathematical error but not what we consider to be the three additional design flaws – can be found here.

That's a step in the right direction, but it doesn't change our rating since it only occurred as a result of our fact-checking. We find so much wrong with this chart that we don’t think it contains any significant approximation of the truth. It made a major calculation error that dramatically skewed the debt increase away from Obama and toward George W. Bush. It glossed over significant variations in time served in office. It cherry-picked the measurement that was favorable to its cause. And it is contradicted by statistics for GDP-adjusted debt, which show Obama to be the most, rather than the least, debt-creating president of the last five. None of this suggests that Obama can’t turn things around as the economy improves (and Democrats can also take some solace in the fact that Bill Clinton did remarkably well in all of our measurements). But in communicating which administrations contributed the most to growth of the debt, this chart is a failure. We rate it Pants on Fire.

What's really shocking is that Politifact exposed the lie. They usually torture data to benefit Democrats.