Excerpt
Presidential Campaign Puffery
Summary
It’s the oldest form of political communication. Before there was Twitter or Facebook, before there were 30-second television ads, or super PACs, or even radio or newspapers — there was the stump speech. Ancient Greek politicians spoke directly to citizens in the Agora in Athens 2,500 years ago; 19th-century American politicians stood on tree stumps to deliver their direct pitches to voters. And today’s politicians are still at it.
Day after day, sometimes several times a day, President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney make their case directly to voters. Most of what they say doesn’t make the news, because they’ve said it before, over and over, and reporters are seeking whatever is new.
But voters should take a few minutes to pay attention. Each man is making his best case for why he deserves to be elected. Voters, however, should also beware. The claims candidates make don’t always square with the facts.
In this article, part one of a two-part series, we examine examples of Obama’s factually exaggerated or misleading claims from two of his recent campaign speeches. We’ll go through Romney’s stump speech at a later time.
There’s plenty here to criticize. Like any candidate, Obama is not pretending to give a detached or balanced picture to his audience. He’s making a sales pitch, leaving out or glossing over inconvenient facts, twisting others and sometimes stating things that aren’t so. To cite just a few examples:
- Obama correctly states that manufacturing jobs have increased by more than half a million since hitting bottom, but he fails to mention that the number regained is less than half the total lost since he took office.
- He claims that “renewable” energy production has doubled on his watch, which isn’t true (only wind and solar have doubled).
- He claims he’d increase the tax rate on high-income earners to no more than they paid under Bill Clinton, when the truth is they’d pay more because of new taxes imposed to pay for the Affordable Care Act.
- He says “independent analysis” validates that his plan would cut $4 trillion from the deficit. But that total is inflated by $1 trillion in “savings” from winding down wars that he has promised to end anyway.
- He accuses Romney of proposing to raise taxes by $2,000 on middle-income taxpayers, when Romney has stated clearly that he wouldn’t do any such thing.
- He attacks Romney’s plan for Medicare as a “voucher” system that would leave seniors “at the mercy of insurance companies,” when the fact is, it’s structured the same as the system Obama’s health care law sets up for subsidizing private insurance for persons under age 65.
There’s more — on automobile fuel efficiency, on imports and on exports. The president even complains of “all the cynicism that’s being fed to you through these negative ads,” as though his own campaign wasn’t spending 69 percent of its own millions on ads attacking Romney.
Full quotes — and our dissections of the misleading claims in the president’s current stump speech — are contained in the Analysis section that follows.
Note to readers: This is the first part of a two-part series examining the factual claims made by both major candidates. We will post our findings about Mitt Romney’s stump-speech claims in a subsequent Featured Article.
Full article includes analysis and sources list.
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