Fox News’s Chris Wallace has been feisty lately: Two weeks ago, he made an admirable (if failed) effort to get Paul Ryan to explain the numbers behind Mitt Romney’s tax plan. And, earlier today, Wallace asked Romney adviser Ed Gillespie to defend the six studies the campaign has routinely cited as proof that the Republican ticket’s tax math adds up. After Wallace called some of the studies “very questionable” and pointed out that “some of them are [blog posts],” one of which was written by Matt Jensen of the American Enterprise Institute which, as Wallace noted, is a conservative think tank and, therefore, probably not a good source unbiased policy analysis. Unsurprisingly, Gillespie disagreed with that assessment, but his argument was not very convincing.
Gillespie: Look, Chris I think if you look at Harvard and AEI [American Enterprise Institute] and other studies are very credible sources for economic analysis
Wallace: You wouldn’t say that AEI is a conservative think tank?
Gillespie: I would say it is a right-leaning think tank. That doesn’t make it not credible.
Wallace: It doesn’t make it nonpartisan.
Gillespie: It does make it nonpartisan. It’s not a partisan organization.
You’ll get ‘em next time, Chris.
