Hyperbole and distortion are a constant in presidential campaign politicking, especially in presidential conventions. Yet candidates’ claims against their opponents have traditionally been rooted to some peg of reality, some scent of truthfulness. Alas, that was not the case in the just-concluded Republican convention. Truth there took a virtually unprecedented beating.
Rep. Paul Ryan, the budget committee chief who authored many of the hurdles used to thwart President Obama efforts to promote stronger economic recovery, led the parade of falsehoods in the run-up to Mitt Romney’s curtain-closer. Ryan falsely claimed that Obama rejected the report of the bipartisan debt commission panel that he created, when it was Ryan’s own opposition that stalled the Simpson-Bowles commission’s recommendations.
It was Ryan and other House Republican leaders, not Obama, who drove the artificial debt ceiling crisis last year, which for months prevented a debt ceiling increase to pay for spending that Congress had already approved. That contrived fiasco, which led to an unprecedented downgrading of the nation’s credit rating, was the doing of the Republicans’ tea party wing, not Obama.
Ryan’s charge that taxpayers got nothing from Obama’s stimulus is also blatantly false: more than a third of that money went to middle-class cuts. A similar chunk, spread over three years, went to state governments – Tennessee took $5 billion — to keep their budgets, services and employee base from falling off the fiscal cliff until reverberations from the 2007-09 Great Recession calmed.
The list of Ryan’s flagrant falsehoods about Obama’s actions and policies – on Medicare, health reform, and the Wisconsin auto plant that was put on the chopping block before Obama was elected – set the stage for Romney’s similarly false litany.