Romney's deceit

A misleading Ohio attack ad?is the latest example of GOP candidate Mitt Romney's mishandling of the truth, Reich writes.

By Robert Reich,?Guest blogger / October 30, 2012

Republican presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney climbs the stairs in a light drizzle as he boards his campaign plane in Vandalia, Ohio, Tuesday.

Charles Dharapak/AP

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Over the weekend, Romney debuted an ad in Ohio?showing cars being crushed as a narrator says Obama ?sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China. Mitt Romney will fight for every American job.?

Skip to next paragraph Robert Reich

Robert is chancellor?s professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley. He has served in three national administrations, most recently as secretary of labor under President Clinton. Time Magazine?named him one of the 10 most effective cabinet secretaries of the last century. He has written 13 books, including ?The Work of Nations,? his latest best-seller ?Aftershock: The Next Economy and America?s Future," and a new?e-book, ?Beyond Outrage.??He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine and chairman of Common Cause.

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In fact, Chrysler is retaining and expanding its Jeep production in North America, including in Ohio. Its profits have enabled it to separately consider expanding into China, the world?s largest auto market.

Responding to the ad, Chrysler emphasized in a blog post that it has ?no intention of shifting production of its Jeep models out of North America to China.??

?They are inviting a false inference,? says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on political advertising.

This is only the most recent in a stream of lies from Romney. Remember his contention that the President planned to ?rob? Medicare of $716 billion when in fact the money would come from reduced payments to providers who were overcharging ? thereby extending the life of Medicare? (Ryan?s plan includes the same $716 billion of savings but gets it from turning Medicare into a voucher and shifting rising health-care costs on to seniors.)

Remember?Romney?s claim that Obama removed the work requirement from the welfare law, when in fact Obama merely allowed governors to fashion harder or broader work requirements???

Recall Romney?s assertion that he is not planning to give the rich a tax cut of almost $5 trillion, when in fact that?s exactly what his budget plan does? Or that his budget will reduce the long-term budget deficit, when in fact his numbers don?t add up??

And so on.??We?re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,? says?Neil Newhouse, a Romney pollster. It is not even being dictated by facts.

There are two lessons here. First, lies financed by deep pockets are hard to refute, but they must be refuted. Otherwise, there is no accountability in our democracy. So far, the American media have not adequately refuted Romney?s lies. They seem to believe that dissembling is permissible, or that pointing out this extraordinary lying machine is itself an act of partisanship.

Second, anyone who tells or countenances such lies cannot be trusted to hold the highest office in our land, because he has no compunctions about feeding false information to the public. In recent memory we?ve had a president who told us there were ?weapons of mass destruction? in Iraq, when in fact there were none. We dare not risk another George W. Bush.

The Christian Science Monitor has assembled a diverse group of the best economy-related bloggers out there. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger, click here. This post originally ran on www.robertreich.org.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/wjiZSQkxnxg/Romney-s-deceit

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