Smooth Romney Plays Fast and Loose With the Facts

   Americans have oftentimes liked a little feistiness in their political officeholders and candidates, whether it’s the Teddy Roosevelt physical hard-charging style and persona or the “my-way-or-the-highway” toughness of a Harry Truman. This also extends to debating performances, which now have a far higher cachet than in decades and even centuries past as they are now seen by millions of people, including many who have scant knowledge of the real issues and how they affect them personally, instead going on their impressions of the debaters to determine who gets their vote. And voters who are already basing their decision solely on last week’s Barack Obama/Mitt Romney exchange may want to take a good look at the post-duel bipartisan fact checkers as regards many of the erroneous and in some cases absolutely false statements that Romney threw out.

  There’s no doubt that the latter came off as both “presidential” and more affable than the negative and fact-challenged campaigner he really is (doubtlessly in an attempt to bring up his low likeability numbers), while the president, though giving a better performance than some pundits have claimed, looked both tired and uncombative.  But at least virtually everything he said about the economic state of the nation compared to the morass his administration inherited and improved was grounded in fact. Let’s take a closer look at the well-delivered fantasy-turned-reality that Romney pushed throughout the contest, while keeping in mind the actuality that anyone can look authoritative and in command of their rhetoric even while falsifying many of their claims.

    1. Mitt Romney alleged that there were currently 23 million unemployed Americans during a lie/exaggeration-filled tirade on Obama’s economic policies. The actual number is 12 million, as Romney simply added on his own hypothetical arithmetic of people not looking currently for employment as well as part-time workers, many of whom don’t want full-time employment anyway. And a couple days later the news that the Republican Party didn’t want to hear came out with the country’s unemployment percentage dropping in September from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent as the United States added 162,000 jobs.

   And Romney also ignores the disgraceful fact (that Obama should’ve brought out forcefully here) that the Republican-dominated House of Representatives in Washington (which unlike the president controls ALL FEDERAL SPENDING AND FISCAL LEGISLATION) has voted in lockstep over the past 3½ years to stop all job bills brought forth by Obama in their tracks, preventing  the creation of 3-4 million new jobs if they had been passed.

   2. Romney, while emphasizing that he will end Obamacare if elected (despite the fact that the national deficit is already lower in part due to its enactment), went back to the usual “scare-the-seniors” trick that the GOP has been doing for the past decade, telling an absolute whopper to buttress his argument. He claimed that the Independent Payment Advisory Board would be able to tell citizens what treatments they could have under Obamacare, minimizing the healthcare options available to Medicare recipients. Actually this board consists of a panel of experts who are put in place to make sure that Medicare costs don’t rise to an unaffordable level by forcing cuts if out-of-pocket costs go above a set threshold. They have nothing to do with any service rationing (remember “unplugging Grandma”?), restricting benefits or raising retirees’ costs.  

  The Republican Party has to take this disingenuous tack, most infamously pushed continuously several years ago in Sarah Palin’s harangues, to frighten elders into believing that any Democrat attempts to alleviate the increasing costs of staying well will actually harm or even kill them.   

   3. “At the same time, gas prices have doubled under the president.” This is one of those “if you keep repeating something stupid enough times, a bunch of people will still believe it” mantras. Barack Obama doesn’t have any more to do with our $3.70 gallon of gasoline than George W. Bush or Jimmy Carter do. Intelligent Americans from both sides of the aisle are sick of Romney and the rest of the GOP pandering to the birther-level intellects who still swallow this nonsense.  

   4. Romney’s lack of basic knowledge about the current national deficit demonstrated throughout  the debate was so ridiculous on so many levels that it’s hard to enumerate them. Let’s start with his outright lie that Obama didn’t incorporate the deficit-reducing recommendations put forth by the commission led by Republican Alan Simpson and Democrat Erskine Bowles  (“Simpson-Bowles -- the president should’ve grabbed that”). Actually Obama had ALREADY adopted many of the precepts offered by the group, including a $1.5 trillion savings cap on discretionary spending, as well as enforced automatic program cuts of $1 for every $2 of additional federal spending.  

   And Simpson-Bowles couldn’t be adopted in its entirety because Romney’s vice-presidential running mate Paul Ryan led the effort to vote it down in Congress! Bet a lot of Obama-bashers didn’t know that. The sad part is that most of them wouldn’t care anyway, just as the fact that the current $1 trillion deficit will be zero by 2017 due to the expiration of the Bush tax cuts this December 31 probably doesn’t resonate with them either.

   Mitt Romney is the most classic example of the proverbial  “wolf in sheep’s clothing” that either political party has submitted for our approval in a long, long time. He has absolutely no plan to fix the economy, and indeed if he is elected all of the tremendous progress America has made on that score during the Obama administration will be scuttled in favor of more “trickle down” millionaire-favoring policies and social engineering that will make the Bush years seem great by comparison.

   The president should’ve done a far better job of forcefully challenging the plethora of inaccuracies and misrepresentations that Romney made last week instead of allowing the challenger to come across like he knew what he was talking about and actually had the slightest trace of empathy for the American electorate. Expect a far tougher Barack Obama at their next meeting October 16, and hopefully viewers will see up close and personal the fish tale Mitt Romney and the GOP are selling our nation. A combination of this man and the Republican platform that he will push which will set back the rights of women, the elderly, veterans, students and the middle class has to be prevented.