Judging Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders, WaPo's fact-checker Glenn Kessler — instead of giving a Pinocchio rating — concludes "Readers have to view these proposals mostly as political messaging statements."

I'm reading "Bernie Sanders vs. Kamala Harris on taxes for Medicare-for-all." Here's the whole conclusion:

Readers have to view these proposals mostly as political messaging statements.

Sanders acknowledges that he will raise taxes on most Americans, but argues that all but the wealthy will experience a net gain in income. Harris is trying to one-up him by saying that she would not impose additional taxes on the middle class, even though Sanders’s pitch is exactly the opposite — that the middle class will experience higher incomes and lower health-care costs. She sidesteps the issue of whether most Americans should pay some kind of premium to get their health care, as they do currently under both Medicare and Obamacare.

Her proposal to impose a financial transactions tax would roughly make up for the lost revenue from not imposing premiums on people making less than $100,000 — but there could be gaping holes elsewhere.

You can see that doesn't say he's avoiding the usual Pinocchios (so, of course, there's no explanation of this deviation from the usual). Has Kessler ever before silently eschewed Pinocchios and substituted a line like "Readers have to view these proposals mostly as political messaging statements"?

I'm a reader, is he telling me what I "have" to do, what point of view I must take? And look at that weasel word: "mostly." Even if I accept his instruction and mostly think That's a political messaging statement, what about the rest of my thoughts? In that part, should I think Bernie and Kamala are somewhat shading the facts (1 Pinocchio), committing significant factual errors or obvious contradictions (2 or 3 Pinocchios), or telling whoppers (4 Pinocchios)? (See the fact checker's own description of the ratings here).

On my own, not following anyone's instructions, I already tend to view everything politicians say as "political messaging statements." So I wonder what's so special about Sanders and Harris that they emerge from a fact checking without experiencing judgment? We, the readers, are told that we shouldn't be so judgmental! Why am I slogging through a fact-checker column when it's perfectly easy to relegate everything candidates to the category "political messaging statements"? I could become the cynic who mutters "It's all politics!" It would save me a lot of time.

I checked the WaPo archive to see if Glenn Kessler had ever used the phrase "political messaging" before. He has not. This is a new exit route for him, it seems. I give it one Pinocchio. I don't know if he's favoring Harris and Sanders or if the straightforward answer is that no one can speak accurately about something as complex as restructuring the financing of health care.

But if the truth is the candidates can't do more than make political messaging statements, then a fact-checker, to be truthful, needs to say that these facts cannot be checked. Ah, but then you see the way in which Harris and Sanders deserve at least 1 Pinocchio: They're making statements about things they cannot know, offering assurances where there is, necessarily, insecurity.