2016 Postmortem
Related: About this forumTurning the dishonesty to 11
Posted with permission.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal/2012_01/turning_the_dishonesty_to_11034952.php
Turning the dishonesty to 11
By Steve Benen
Last nights debate for the remaining presidential candidates offered Mitt Romney a chance to try to turn his campaign around. He hasnt had much luck lately, and confidence in his candidacy has been badly shaken, especially after Romney turned a double-digit lead in South Carolina into a double-digit defeat.
But one of the former governors more disconcerting qualities is his reliance on falsehoods to get back in the game.
I wont fact-check every claim from the debate, but there were some doozies that should, if honesty in politics had more meaning, cause Romney and his team some headaches. He claimed Dodd-Frank was hurting community banks, but thats not true. He said he never advocated for a national health care mandate, and thats false, too. He repeated his misleading claim about the size of the U.S. Navy; he claimed not to have received an inheritance; and he claims his private-equity firm never did any work with the government. All of these claims are deceptive, if not demonstrably wrong.
The most irksome, though, was this claim:
This is an important part of Romneys indictment against the president, so its worth unpacking it a bit. Lets take this one claim at a time.
* Anyone who seriously believes U.S. fiscal challenges are in any way similar to Greece is a fool.
* The Affordable Care Act doesnt add to the debt, it cuts the debt by hundreds of billions of dollars.
* The stimulus created millions of private-sector jobs. Indeed, take a look at private-sector job growth since the start of the recession:
Since March 2010, the U.S. economy has added 3.1 million private-sector jobs. Even playing by Republican rules, thats 3.1 million more than zero.
And as for whether President Obama has failed, Mitt Romney has argued repeatedly this month that under Obama, the economy has gotten better. That sounds to me like the opposite of failure.
Im not optimistic this will ever happen, but Romneys penchant for dishonesty in high-profile settings deserves to be a story unto itself.