Excerpt
Presidential Campaign Puffery
Summary
To the strains of Kid Rock’s “Born Free,” Mitt Romney took to the stage at a minor league baseball park in Nashua, N.H., on Sept. 7 flanked by his wife, Ann, and delivered a standard — albeit slightly longer — version of his stump speech.
But unless you were at Holman Stadium that day, saw it on the local TV news or read about it the next day in the Union Leader, you probably didn’t hear anything about it. That’s true of most stump speeches.
While the Nashua stump speech was very much a local event, presidential candidates tend to deliver very similar versions of the same speech over and over as they make their long-form pitch to audiences around the country. Just as with our previous analysis of Obama’s stump speech, we found numerous instances of candidate spin in what Romney had to say. For example:
- Romney says Obama “said by now [unemployment] would be down to 5.4 percent.” But Romney is referring to a speculative report issued at the beginning of Obama’s presidency containing projections — not promises. Those projections relied on prevailing economic models that quickly proved to have underestimated the depths of the recession at that time.
- Romney says median family income dropped $5,000 under Obama. That’s an exaggeration. The true loss of inflation-adjusted, median family income was $3,290 during Obama’s first three years. Romney’s figure is based on a report that covers a period that includes 13 months before Obama took office.
- Romney says health insurance premiums have gone up $2,500 under Obama. The actual increase has been $1,700, most of which was absorbed by employers and only a small part of which is attributable to the health care law.
- Romney blames Obama for the cost of gasoline doubling, but that’s misleading. Gasoline prices happened to be unusually low when Obama took office due to the recession and financial crisis.
- Romney cited a Chamber of Commerce survey as evidence that small-business owners are less likely to hire because of the health care law. But experts warn not to place too much weight on the survey because it was an opt-in, online survey.
- Romney said Obama “cut Medicare by $716 billion to pay for Obamacare,” but these cuts in the future growth of spending prolong the life of the Medicare trust fund, stretching the program’s finances out longer than they would last otherwise.
- Romney said the health care law is “killing jobs in small business.” But CBO says the law would have a “small” impact on jobs, mainly affecting the amount of labor workers choose to supply. Those getting subsidies, for instance, might work less hours since they’re paying less for health care.
- Romney said he would bring health care costs down by “finally deal[ing] with malpractice costs,” but experts say medical malpractice doesn’t make much of a dent in health care spending.
There are other misleading claims — including bluster on the Keystone XL pipeline and a claim that Obama has lived up to a “promise” about “skyrocketing” energy costs. And, of course, no Romney speech is complete without a reference to Obama’s comment, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that,” a quote that has been lifted out of context.
Full quotes and our analysis of the accuracy of claims in Romney’s stump speech are contained in the Analysis section..... (in the full article).
Note to readers: This is the second part of a two-part series examining the factual claims made by both major candidates. We posted our findings about President Barack Obama’s stump-speech claims in a previous Featured Article.
Full article contains analysis and source list.
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