President Obama hasth facts on his side and the best policies for advancing prosperity, tax equity, jobs and secure health care for the broad range of middle-class Americans, yet he let Mitt Romney out-punch him – often with below-the-belt hits and pure deceit – in their first presidential debate Wednesday night. Voters who don’t keep tabs on the fact-checking analyses that separate distortions and falsehoods from the actual policy and budget proposals of the candidates likely would give Romney higher marks for his showy debate performance.
Romney turned out to be more aggressive and cogent in repeating his talking points, though many flipped the facts upside down. He repeatedly denied, for example, that his implausible tax cuts would add to federal debt, never mind the documented math. And he returned repeatedly to false claims, like the charge that Obama’s 10-year projection for reining in Medicare spending would “cut” $716 billion from Medicare.
Both are patently false. Obama correctly emphasized that Romney’s proposed tax plan, as scored by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, actually would cost $7 trillion in new debt over the next 10 years – $5 trillion for more lopsided tax cuts and $2 trillion in added defense spending – while Obama’s proposed budget plan for the same period would trim federal debt by $4 trillion. Romney just kept intensely denying those findings, without once being required to make his claim add up.
Obama would largely reap his Medicare savings by eliminating the 2003 GOP-legislated Medicare subsidies for private insurers’ profit margins on Medicare Part B Advantage and prescription drug policies. Obama would put those savings back into Medicare to broaden coverage, to close the prescription “doughnut hole, and to extend the life of the Medicare trust fund. Romney’s plan, conversely, would dismantle Medicare for, as he said, younger Americans “under 60.”
Obama failed to nail effective rebuttals, however, allowing Romney to keep pounding fallacious statements. He let Romney airbrush his aim to voucherize Medicare. He let him hammer the false claim that Obama was somehow responsible for the consequences – the revenue fall-off, deficits and fearsome 8.8 million lost jobs – of the historically deep recession that greeted Obama when he took office. He further failed to rebut Romney’s fabrication that Obama wasted $90 billion on “green energy,” though the energy efficiency component in the stimulus package was far smaller, and most of it went to energy conservation projects with a long return.