"Stubby"?

In the last post, I mention that I'm not interested in bashing Howard Dean, mainly because I think that time spent focusing on Dean is time not spent on President Bush. However, I guess it goes without saying that others disagree: here is a blog devoted specifically to bashing Howard Dean. (Link via Alex Frantz.)

I haven't dug too deeply into things on that site -- and I'm sure that Morat will hate it on sight! -- but I did look at this post, in which Politus (the blogger) presents some numerical data that apparently gives the lie to a statement Dean made to the effect that he is the only Democratic candidate who comes from a "farm state", and that therefore he's the only one who "understands farm issues". However, the numbers Politus uses to illustrate his point don't really work, because he quotes total farm employment figures, which given the populations of the various states involved, is rather misleading. Vermont is one of the smallest, and least populated, states in the country, so it's pretty obvious that it very likely has fewer total farmers than Arkansas, North Carolina, or Ohio.

A better indicator would have been to look at what percentage of those states' total employment numbers are represented by farming. Doing that, we come up with the following:

Vermont	16.5 %
Arkansas	20.8 %
Massachusetts	12.3 %
Missouri	16.3 %
North Carolina	18.5 %
Ohio	13.7 %

Now, Dean's statement seems a tad disingenuous, since two of those states derive a greater percentage of their total employment from farming than does Vermont, and a third is only slightly smaller in percentage terms. And I'm not even certain that farm employment is the relevant statistic here. A better indicator of a "farm state", it seems to me, is not the total number of people working in farms, or even the percentage of a state's labor force working in farms, but the percentage of a state's economic activity that derives from farm and farm-related business. A state whose workforce is, say, 15 % farmers but whose total economic activity comes, say, 40 % from the ag sector seems to me to have a better claim on being a "farm state" than a state whose workforce is 20 % farmers but whose total economy is only 30 % farming.

And even if all those numbers go against Dean, he can always play the "governor" card, claiming a greater knowledge of "farm issues" by virtue of his being Governor of a "farm state", as opposed to, say, a career military man who hails from a farm state, or a Congressman or Senator likewise sent to Washington by a farm state. It's easy to see how he'd frame that case: "As Governor, I've had to set policy on a day-to-day basis for my state's farmers, yada yada yada."

So, this may well be a questionable assertion on Howard Dean's part, one of those wonderful pieces of campaign hyperbole that stream unceasingly from candidates' mouths in any election cycle, but it has not been shown yet to be a "lie".