(1) At the end of David Frum’s Comeback there is a striking anecdote about President Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina.

Between 2004 and the end of 2006, the total population of Orleans and Jefferson parishes dropped by more than 150,000 people. The Latino population, however, jumped from 10,000 to 60,000, as immigrants (many of them illegal) rushed to take reconstruction work.

A sixfold increase in the Latino population–that’s a striking illustration of several of the trends Frum writes about in his book. I repeated the claim to someone right after reading the book. Later I checked Frum’s footnote, which directs you to a New York Times story. Here’s what it says:

According to the Louisiana Health and Population Survey, released in November, the number of Latinos living in households in Orleans and Jefferson Parishes has increased by about 10,000 since 2004, to 60,000.

So instead of a 500 percent increase, there was a 20 percent increase. There’s David Frum’s vaunted empiricism for you.

(2) At the beginning of the book, Frum twits Michael Barone.

After the disturbing elections of 1996 and 2000, the great political observer Michael Barone tried to cheer up Republicans by pointing out that Red State America had more children than Blue State America. Conservatives might be ceasing to outvote liberals–but they were at least outbreeding them! . . .
But this is the very opposite of good news for Republicans. The reason that the red states have so many more children than the blue states is that they have so many more Hispanic immigrants. And those increasing Hispanic populations will slowly but surely push red states into the blue column.

Frum provides no footnote for this remarkable claim. It is implausible on its face. We know that states with high white fertility rates voted more strongly for Bush than other states, which suggests that Frum’s basic point here is untrue.

(3) Frum talks about changes in the economy between the mid-1980s and today. “Millions and millions of American families shared in the good times. Millions and millions more, however, did not.” No support for this startling claim is given.

I didn’t have time to check every claim in the book. Usually when I did check one of his claims, though, it didn’t bear out. Frum portrays himself as a bold truth-teller who is being pounced on by ideological enforcers on the right. (“We all have our vices, and yes, I have always had a tendency toward deviationism. I see new things, and I think new thoughts. It’s a bad habit I know, but my efforts to suppress it have been unavailing.” Does Frum really not understand why someone might find this tactic insufferable?) I will persist in holding that his book has some real insights about what’s wrong with conservatism. But among its flaws is a pervasive sloppiness with the facts it prides itself on facing.