Get Lost, Niall!

In a polemical essay, celebrity historian Niall Ferguson has called for Obama to be replaced. But in it, he plays fast and easy with the facts. Instead of hurting Obama, he has only succeeded in discrediting himself.

Anyone who has ever read a book by Niall Ferguson knows one thing for certain: This historian loves to think big and doesn’t depend much on facts that don’t already fit his conclusions. That, plus he likes to illustrate his opinionated histories with anecdotes. That describes exactly the essay he wrote for Newsweek magazine this week in which he expresses his disappointment with Barack Obama. The president hasn’t kept his promises, he says. And he advises, “Hit the road, Barack.” In all fairness, he does admit that he was a John McCain supporter in 2008.

Unfortunately, many of the assertions he uses to justify getting rid of Obama don’t back up his argument. Ferguson writes, for example, that despite a 74 percent rise in the stock market since 2009, there were 4.3 million fewer jobs than there were in January 2008. The astute reader might well wonder why he takes two different time periods to compare stock market success with job market failure. The explanation is quite simple: Ferguson wants to make Obama responsible for job losses that occurred before he was even in office. In an Atlantic magazine article, Matthew O’Brien correctly points out this and several other errors made by Ferguson in his polemic. Just how stupid does Harvard professor Ferguson think his readers are?

Unemployment Figures Are Relatively High

Most of the jobs lost were lost on George W. Bush’s watch and in the first quarter of 2009 before Obama’s policies had time to take effect. Added to that, the number of unemployed is relatively high (something Ferguson naturally criticizes) because of the fact that Republicans in the individual states they govern had mercilessly cut public sector jobs. New jobs were created in the private sector, however, due largely to Obama’s investment programs.

Nobel Prize Laureate Paul Krugman reacted swiftly and forcefully to Ferguson’s concoction. Krugman considers Ferguson’s piece “unethical,” illustrating his contention with Ferguson’s criticism of Obama’s healthcare reform plan. Ferguson claimed the independent Congressional Budget Office — a body that reviews budgets on behalf of Congress — showed those reforms would cost $1.2 billion between 2012 and 2022. That’s an outright lie. The CBO figures show Obama’s reforms would reduce the government debt by $210 million. Krugman fumed that this wasn’t just a matter of ideology, it was a falsification of the facts.

In a bizarre rebuttal, Ferguson tried to deny Krugman’s clear and undeniable facts but failed miserably. James Fallows subsequently wrote in the Atlantic, “Seriously, I wonder if one of Ferguson’s students will have the panache to turn in a similar paper to see how it fares.”

In a second reaction, Krugman posed another decisive question: How can it be that a noted publication like Newsweek would even print such a faulty piece? He wondered if there were no fact checkers on their staff. That used to be one of the magazine’s principle strengths. Krugman closed his article by saying, “We know what Ferguson is going to do: he’s going to brazen it out, actually boasting about the deftness with which he misled his readers. But what is Newsweek going to do?” Up to now, Newsweek has done nothing. The staff there shouldn’t be surprised if their audience begins abandoning the already embattled publication.