Politifact.com has published a new article on how they came to their ruling, which also explains why their "older" rulings had a different standard.
Needless to say, it another article that's just filled with horse manure. So I decided to send a second letter to them. (You can read my first letter here.)
If what they said in the article is true:
We started checking this one about 10 hours before the State of the Union address after PolitiFact Texas Editor Gardner Selby heard the claim from Obama adviser David Plouffe in a TV interview. Gardner suggested we check it.
Realizing that Plouffe's line would probably be in the State of the Union, PolitiFact National writer Lou Jacobson, who does many of our fact-checks on economic claims, began looking at the numbers. By early afternoon, Lou had his reporting done and had concluded that the numbers were right.
It means that the hard facts of the speech was determined to be true 10 hour before the speech. That's not the issue for the Half-True-Turned-Mostly-True ruling.
They were trying to determine the context of the statement within the speech itself, and they came to the conclusion that the President was claiming credit for the recovery.
Except he didn't, because nowhere did he mention the Stimulus or anything else in the portion in question.
The President was merely telling us how it's been in the past few years. How it was really bad, but getting better. The speech is called the "State of the Union address" for a reason, in that, it tells Congress (and everyone in the country), how the state of our union is, and what he's planning on doing about them.
If mentioning a time frame at which various events occurs constitutes indications of credit/responsibility, I would have a really huge problem in coming up with a "true" statement that can satisfy the Politifact editors.
Consider the following statement:
Before I woke up, the house was on fire. It was burning really bad when I got up, and consumed 1/4 of the hosue before I called the Fire Department. After 4 hours, the fire is finally controlled by the brave firefighters.
That doesn't mean I'm claiming credit for the fire being placed under control due to my action, but that the timeline went like that. Their logic of arbitrarily coming up with a context they see fit is a joke and mockery to common sense. If they believe the statement is "Mostly True", why don't they try to rephrase it in the speech so it'll be a "True" statement? Alas, I doubt that's even possible.
The mere mentioning of the good things that's going on in the country would be equated as an attempt to claim credit by the good folks at Politifact.
Here's what I've sent them.
Which is that the President was merely presenting "the state of union" in everything you've quoted instead of trying to claim credit for what's going on. He's giving a background picture for the things he's planning forward, instead of touting the success of past policies.
Notice how that entire portion you have quoted never once mentioned the word "stimulus"?
The fact of the matter is, if you look at the whole speech, specifically at the point in the speech, he was painting a picture of "it was tough, but it's getting better". Nowhere was there any credit-claiming, explicit or implicit, in that portion of the speech.