At the turn of this century, Bill Clark, a Greenwood insurance agency owner, got on a roll writing columns to this newspaper decrying the “Big Lie” technique that he contended Washington was practicing.
Clark, now deceased, mostly got riled about the claim of then-President Bill Clinton, and oft-repeated in the news media, that after decades of deficits, the national government was running a budget surplus under the Democrat’s watch.
If such a surplus were true, Clark would ask, how come the national debt, by the federal government’s own bookkeeping, keeps rising every year?
He claimed that Clinton and his backers had stolen a page out of the German propaganda playbook of the World War II era, in which the Nazis would widely disseminate falsehoods, and stick to them with such feigned conviction, until the lies began to be accepted as truth.
A version of the “Big Lie” technique has made its way to Mississippi in the persons of Gov. Phil Bryant and the No. 2 Republican in state government, Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves.
Both Bryant and Reeves have been claiming repeatedly in recent months that Mississippi is doing great under their leadership of the past six years, much better than their naysayers would argue. They cite in tandem several “statistics” to back their claim: record-low rates of unemployment and high rates for graduation and third-grade reading competency.
If not exactly a “big lie,” their technique is definitely a “big half-truth.”
At his recent State of the State address, Bryant was boasting about the state’s unemployment rate falling to below 5 percent for several months this past year. “That’s the lowest they’ve been since unemployment levels began to be recorded in 1979,” he said.
All true, but also only half the truth.
Unemployment rates are a gauge of the economy, but only a partial gauge. Arguably more important is knowing how many people actually have jobs.
On that count, the numbers are not impressive for the Bryant/Reeves years.
Even while the average unemployment rate fell from 10.0 percent in 2011, the year before the GOP duo began their current jobs, to 5.8 in 2016, the actual number of employed Mississippians actually fell slightly. The reason that the unemployment rate dropped so much over those five years was not because more people found work but because almost 60,000 either gave up looking or moved elsewhere. That would be consistent with the data, downplayed by Bryant and Reeves, that shows the state has lost population for the past three years.
The 2017 annual employment average is not out yet, but it’s probably going to show more of the same. In November, the latest month reported, most of the improvement in the jobless rate from the prior year was due to residents moving or dropping out of the job market.
As far as those touted education gains, again Bryant and Reeves are only telling half-truths.
Yes, Mississippi’s graduation rate is better, but what they routinely fail to mention — as does equally duplicitous state Superintendent of Education Carey Wright — is that during this time of “improvement,” the state watered down the standards required to graduate.
There’s no way to tell if students are actually doing better because it’s like comparing apples and oranges. What is clear is that if the previous, tougher standards had been in place, 19 percent of last year’s graduates would have been in danger of not getting a diploma.
As for the third-grade reading gate, of which Bryant is so proud of pushing to implementation, that’s also a joke. When that law was being enacted in 2013, Bryant said it would stop social promotion — or at least slow it down — by ensuring that every third-grader was reading at grade level before being promoted to fourth grade.
In actuality, because of the low bar currently in place for passing the test, about a fourth of Mississippi third-graders who met the law’s requirement last year were actually reading below grade level.
This misinformation campaign by Bryant and Reeves is not just a reflection of the optimistic, “glass half-full” perspective that they claim to have.
It is a designed effort to hoodwink the citizens of this state into believing that Mississippi is doing better economically and educationally than it is.
Reeves’ motivation for the deception is obvious. He wants to be governor — or possibly a U.S. senator — when his time as lieutenant governor is up. Whether Bryant has other political ambitions is not as clear.
He does, though, have a legacy to try to burnish. If he can’t do it with the whole truth, he’ll apparently shave off however much he thinks is necessary.
Tim Kalich is the editor and publisher of the Greenwood Commonwealth.
