The Final Call

Romney, Republicans long on rhetoric, short on facts

By Askia Muhammad -Senior Correspondent- | Last updated: Sep 10, 2012 - 10:52:32 AM

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WASHINGTON (FinalCall.com) - Republican Mitt Romney accepted his party’s presidential nomination Aug. 30, the final night of a topsy-turvy Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., vowing to revive the U.S. economy and with a plea for the votes of those who are disappointed with President Barack Obama’s first term.

Mr. Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, aggressively challenged the President, depicting him as a leader who had made big promises but who had failed to deliver on what Americans need most, namely jobs.

“How many days have you woken up feeling that something really special was happening in America?” Gov. Romney asked during his remarks. “Many of you felt that way on Election Day four years ago. Hope and change had a powerful appeal.

“But tonight I’d ask a simple question: If you felt that excitement when you voted for Barack Obama, shouldn’t you feel that way now that he’s President Obama? You know there’s something wrong with the kind of job he’s done as president when the best feeling you had was the day you voted for him.”

Gov. Romney defended his own work at the investment firm Bain Capital, and he pledged to create 12 million new jobs. But his campaign and that of his vice presidential pick Rep. Paul Ryan (D-Wis.) have been marred by constant complaints by media fact-checkers that many of their harsh condemnations of Mr. Obama are based on exaggerated distortions, statements taken out of context, and outright “lies.”

After the convention, David Gregory, host of NBC’s “Meet The Press” accused vice presidential candidate Ryan of “ideological amnesia,” according to a report by the Associated Press.

A Washington Post Opinion editor called Mr. Ryan’s convention speech “breathtakingly dishonest” in a headline on his newspaper’s “PostPartisan” blog, declaring that it was “filled with falsehoods from start to finish.” Sahil Kapur wrote for Talking Points Memo that the speech “strained the facts on multiple occasions.”

CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer said on the air after Mr. Ryan’s speech, “I marked at least seven or eight points I’m sure fact-checkers will have some opportunities to dispute if they want to go forward.” Gov. Romney’s speech was no better for honesty, but his campaign stated clearly “we are not going to be led by fact checkers,” Gloria Browne-Marshall, an author of several textbooks on law, and an instructor at the City University of New York (CUNY) told The Final Call.

“As president, I’ll protect the sanctity of life,” Gov. Romney said. “I’ll honor the institution of marriage. And I will guarantee America’s first liberty, the freedom of religion. President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family.

“I will begin my presidency with a jobs tour. President Obama began his presidency with an apology tour. America, he said, had dictated to other nations. No, Mr. President, America has freed other nations from dictators.”

The enthusiastic audience interrupted with chants: “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” they cheered.

“Every American was relieved the day President Obama gave the order, and SEAL Team 6 took out Osama bin Laden,” he continued. “On another front, every American is less secure today because he has failed to slow Iran’s nuclear threat.

“In his first TV interview as president, he said we should talk to Iran. We’re still talking, and Iran’s centrifuges are still spinning. President Obama has thrown allies like Israel under the bus, even as he has relaxed sanctions on Castro’s Cuba,” he continued.

Mr. Romney has been repeating that same “apology” charge for months on end. “But in a lengthy column last year, we tracked down every statement (Mr.) Obama uttered that partisans claim was an apology,” Glenn Kessler, author of the “Fact Checker” column in The Washington Post wrote after the speech. “And (we) concluded that each one had been misquoted or taken out of context. His (President Obama’s) comments were not much different than his predecessor, former President George W. Bush.”

Over the course of his presidential campaign this year and last year, Gov. Romney has told 533 lies, writer Steve Benen documented for the website Patheos.com. Others, including the Rachel Maddow blog for MSNBC, began in January 2012, posting a weekly chronicle of Mr. Romney’s misstatements.

For example: Mr. Romney—who wrote an op-ed article in 2008 titled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt,” ahead of the auto-industry bailout which President Obama supported—stated this year that: “While a lot of (GM) workers and investors got the short end of the stick, Obama’s union allies—and his major campaign contributors—reaped reward upon reward, all on the taxpayer’s dime.” In an online headline, The Chicago Tribune called the convention “Team Romney’s War Against Facts.”

Concerning the auto industry bailout, Rep. Ryan, Mr. Romney’s running mate, told what one media outlet called a “whopper” in his nomination acceptance speech Aug. 29 when he contradicted his own congressional opposition to government spending, and bailout intervention concerning a shuttered auto plant in his hometown of Janesville, Wis. “A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant,” he said.

“Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: ‘I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years,’ ” Rep. Ryan recalled. “That’s what he said in 2008. Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day.”

What Mr. Ryan failed to point out in his attack on the president is that the plant in question closed before Mr. Obama was even inaugurated in January 2009.

Mr. Ryan also said the Obama presidency, “began with a perfect Triple-A credit rating for the United States; it ends with a downgraded America.” Talking Points Memo reported, “Standard & Poors downgraded the country’s sovereign debt rating in 2011 because congressional Republicans, of which Ryan is a key leader, threatened not to increase the country’s borrowing authority—risking a default on the debt—unless Democrats agreed to slash trillions of dollars from domestic social programs and investments.

“Ryan even suggested that “the country’s creditors would forgive default for ‘a day or two or three or four’ as long as Democrats ultimately agreed to GOP demands.”

Rep. Ryan is chair of the Republican-controlled Budget Committee in the House of Representatives. He is well known in Washington for his budget—supported by every single Republican in the House—which dramatically cuts and privatizes the popular Medicare program for seniors. Though his convention speech made no mention of his own Medicare budget plan, he accused the president—in what is a widely broadcast GOP anti-Obama ad campaign—of being the real threat to Medicare.

“You see, even with all the hidden taxes to pay for the health care takeover, even with new taxes on nearly a million small businesses, the planners in Washington still didn’t have enough money. They needed more. They needed hundreds of billions more. So, they just took it all away from Medicare. Seven hundred and sixteen billion dollars, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama. An obligation we have to our parents and grandparents is being sacrificed, all to pay for a new entitlement we didn’t even ask for. The greatest threat to Medicare is Obamacare, and we’re going to stop it,” he said.

What Mr. Obama in fact proposed was future savings in Medicare spending through targeted cuts to health care providers, not cuts in benefits to seniors. Mr. Ryan’s budget plan included similar cost cutting proposals, which would be used to pay for tax cuts targeted to the wealthiest Americans.

The convention was also marred by a number of off-stage logistical nightmares, as well as a bizarre appearance of “surprise guest” actor Clint Eastwood who delivered a rambling, unscripted, 11 minute speech in primetime, ahead of Gov. Romney’s appearance in which the former mayor of Carmel, Calif. had a conversation with an empty chair on stage, which he said represented President Obama.

On top of that, the meeting, which was bereft of Black delegates—only 46 out of more than 4,300 total—had its night in which prominent Black speakers appeared, marred by an ugly anti-Black incident.

Instead of attention being focused on Utah Mayor Mia Love, the daughter of Haitian immigrants who is likely to become the first Black Republican female elected to Congress this November; or on Democratic party defector Artur Davis who held a seat in Congress from Alabama, the spotlight was stolen by Patricia Carroll, a Black CNN camerawoman, who was the victim of a racist attack by two delegates or alternates in the crowd who threw peanuts at her and told her, “This is how we feed animals.”

The men were escorted from the meeting and the GOP condemned their behavior.

The event was also thrown off its stride by a tropical storm—turned to a hurricane, then back to tropical storm again, named Isaac—which cast dark clouds over Tampa in the days before the convention, leading organizers to cancel their first day of activities, and change the scheduled delegate roll call which officially nominated Gov. Romney and Rep. Ryan. The storm took a turn away from the convention site, crashing instead into New Orleans on the seventh anniversary of the devastating Hurricane Katrina.

Although flooding was extensive in Louisiana, the New Orleans levee system which was reinforced after Katrina, withstood the storm’s onslaught.