“Make Up Another Lie”: What To Do When A Talking Point Gets Taken Away
Every day for months, the attack on President Obama was the same: the unemployment rate is above 8 percent, so voters have no choice but to consider him a failure — no matter how severe an economic catastrophe he inherited.
This changed on Friday when recent gains pushed the jobless rate to 7.8 percent, the lowest rate in four years. Obama is now overseeing the best election-year improvement in unemployment figures since Reagan’s “Morning in America” re-election bid in 1984.
If you’re a Republican, what do you do? As it turns out, there are two schools of thought.
The first is, keep repeating the attack anyway, even though it’s no longer true. Restore Our Future, the Republican super PAC, expanded an ad buy this week in three swing states describing the jobless rate as “over 8 percent.” Karl Rove’s American Crossroads attack ad shows viewers an 8.1 percent unemployment rate, rather than the actual one.
Why let facts and good economic news get in the way of a perfectly good attack?
The second is the one adopted by Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan: move the goalposts. The Republican presidential hopeful is now arguing, “[I]t looks like unemployment is getting better, but the truth is, if the same share of people were participating in the workforce today as on the day the president got elected, our unemployment rate would be around 11 percent.” Ryan said the same thing this week.
Like far too much of Romney’s rhetoric, this is wildly misleading:
[The charge] assumes all things are equal in the labor force, when in fact it is constantly churning and evolving. In particular, besides the aftermath of the Great Recession, the composition of the labor force has been affected by the retirement of the leading edge of the Baby Boom generation.
Our colleagues at WonkBlog explored this issue earlier this year, showing that the peak of the labor force participation rate, or LFPR, was reached during the end of President Bill Clinton’s term and that since then it has been on a downward track…. The Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago in March estimated that just over half of the post-1999 decline in the labor force participation rate was explained by long-running demographic patterns, such as the retirement of the baby boomers.
In other words, Romney/Ryan would have you believe the sharp improvement in the job market doesn’t count because of demographic trends. That’s marginally better than simply repeating false and out-of-date attacks, but there’s no reason to take the GOP rhetoric seriously.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 10, 2012
“An Ethical Morass”: The Wall Street Journal Won’t Acknowledge Its Karl Rove Ties
Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal continues to trip over its Karl Rove conflict of interest, with the paper’s newsroom routinely failing to mention that the man who helped found an anti-Obama super PAC is also a Journal employee. Time and again this election season the Journal has reported on Rove’s campaign work with American Crossroads, and time and again the newsroom has neglected to acknowledge Rove works for the Journal as a political columnist.
The disclosure failure, and the obvious lack of transparency, is just part of the paper’s ongoing ethical morass with regards to Rove. As Media Matters has reported, scores of editorial page editors have criticized the paper for failing to disclose in its opinion pages where Rove’s anti-Obama columns appear, that Rove is closely associated with an anti-Obama campaign group.
The very fact that the Journal hired Rove, a GOP fundraiser, to write columns about the races Rove is trying to win for the GOP represents a glaring ethical lapse. The Journal’s refusal to disclose those ties only compounds the problem; a problem that extends from the opinion pages to the newsroom.
Today’s front-page Journal article examines whether conservative super PACs have been effective in denting the president’s re-election chances. Rove’s Crossroads group is featured as the pivotal conservative super PAC in the article. Yet nowhere in the piece is it reported that Rove also works for the newspaper.
That transparency failure has become commonplace. On September 6, the newspaper published an article about super PAC fundraising efforts by liberal and conservative groups and noted, “By contrast, American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, two Republican groups founded with the help of Karl Rove, have spent $67 million combined.”
There was no mention that Rove’s a Journal employee.
On Sept. 5, the Journal focused on the surprisingly tight U.S. senate race in North Dakota, and the amount of outside money pouring into the campaign:
Crossroads GPS, a Republican campaign fund co-founded by Karl Rove in 2010, and Majority PAC, a group that aims to protect Democrats’ Senate majority, have spent heavily and run negative ads in the state.
No mention that Rove’s a WSJ employee.
And back on July 19, the newspaper reported that Crossroads was coming to the aide of Romney with new television ads designed to defend the candidate’s career at Bain Capitol. The Journal noted the super PAC “was founded with the help of Bush White House aide, Karl Rove.”
No mention though, that Rove’s a Journal employee.
By: Eric Boehlert, Sr. Fellow, Media Matters, September 24, 2012
“Romney’s Lying Machine”: A Campaign Not Worthy Of The Public’s Trust
I’ve been struck by the boldness of Romney’s repetitive lies about Obama — that Obama ended the work requirement under welfare, for example, or that Obama’s Affordable Care Act cuts $716 billion from Medicare benefits.
The mainstream media along with a half-dozen independent fact-checking organizations and sites have called Romney on these whoppers, but to no avail. He keeps making these assertions.
Every campaign is guilty of exaggerations, embellishments, distortions, and half-truths. But this is another thing altogether. I’ve been directly involved in seven presidential campaigns, and I don’t recall a presidential candidate lying with such audacity, over and over again. Why does he do it, and how can he get away with it?
The obvious answer is such lies are effective. Polls show voters are starting to believe them, especially in swing states where they’re being repeated constantly in media spots financed by Romney’s super PAC or ancillary PACs and so-called “social welfare” organizations (political fronts disguised as charities, such as Karl Rove and the Koch brothers have set up).
Romney’s lying machine is extraordinarily well financed. By August, according to Jane Mayer in her recent New Yorker article, at least 33 billionaires had each donated a quarter of a million dollars or more to groups aiming to defeat Obama – with most of it flooding into attack ads in swing states.
In early August, “Americans for Prosperity,” one of the nonprofit front groups masquerading as a charity, and founded in part by billionaire right-wingers Charles and David Koch, bought some $27 million in ad time on spots now airing in eleven swing states.
So Romney’s lying machine is working.
But what does all this tell us about the man who is running this lying machine? (Or if Romney’s not running it, what does it tell us about a man who would select the people who are?)
We knew he was a cypher — that he’ll say and do whatever is expedient, change positions like a chameleon, eschew any core principles.
Yet resorting to outright lies — and organizing a presidential campaign around a series of lies — reveals a whole new level of cynicism, a profound disdain for what remains of civility in public life, and a disrespect of the democratic process.
The question is whether someone who is willing to resort to such calculated lies, and build a campaign machine around them, can be worthy of the public’s trust with the most powerful office in the world.
By: Robert Reich, Robert Reich Blog, August 24, 2012
“The Act Speaks For Itself”: Todd Akin Fiasco Gets Rove To Admit, Again, Why Crossroads Exists
Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS is allowed to spend unlimited amounts of money on attack ads in battlegrounds states—without ever disclosing a single donor—because it has protected status as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization. Unlike Super PACs, which must disclose donors, Crossroads GPS and other groups don’t have to disclose because they supposedly don’t have political activity as a primary purpose, and therefore are allowed to protect their funding sources.
This, of course, is one of the Big Lies in American politics. Of course the primary purpose of Crossroads GPS—which is run by former high-level Republican Party officials—is to influence elections. In recent months, there’s been increasing pressure on the IRS to call the bluff: Congressional Democrats wrote a letter to the agency asking it to reconsider the tax status of Crossroads GPS and other groups, and nine Republican senators quickly responded with an ominous letter to the IRS warning it not to act.
But Crossroads GPS’s decision to pull television advertising in Missouri in the wake of Republican Senate candidate Representative Todd Akin’s abhorrent comments about rape and pregnancy are (another) bold admission of why the group really exists.
Crossroads GPS is a major player in the Missouri Senate race—it has spent $5.4 million already, which more than doubles the $2.2 million spent by Akin’s actual campaign. The ads “seek to paint [Democratic candidate Claire] McCaskill as a big government-loving, tax-increasing liberal” and hit her for voting to increase the debt limit, among other things.
Under the law, Crossroads GPS and other 501(c)(4) can’t expressly advocate for or against the election of a specific candidate—it can intervene in political races “as long as its primary purpose is the promotion of social welfare” (and then no more than 50 percent of its total activities should be such interventions). Ostensibly these ads are educational—telling voters about issues at stake in a race, but not backing a particular candidate.
But after Akin made his horrific comments about “legitimate rape,” Crossroads GPS announced it was pulling all advertising. “The act speaks for itself,” Crossroads spokesman Nate Hodson said.
This obviously vitiates any argument that the ads are simply to promote social welfare—that, say, the most recent spot is simply meant to educate voters about the national debt. What has changed about McCaskill’s vote on the debt limit? Nothing. What has changed is that suddenly the Republican candidate in that race is viewed as unelectable by basically the entire political establishment—and now Crossroads doesn’t want to spend any more money there. That act speaks for itself, indeed.
By: George Zornick, The Nation, August 21, 2012
“Plutocrat To Plutocrat”: Did The Koch Brothers Buy Paul Ryan’s Nomination With $100 Million Promise?
Veteran Republican political consultant, unrepentant dirty trickster, and recently reborn libertarian Roger Stone yesterday published a startling accusation against Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney on his personal website, The Stone Zone. According to Stone, the billionaire Koch brothers purchased the Republican vice presidential nomination for Ryan from Romney in late July by promising to fork over an additional $100 million toward “independent expenditure” campaigning for the GOP ticket.
Any such transaction would represent a serious violation of federal election laws and perhaps other statutes, aside from the ethical and character implications for all concerned. Although Stone is not the most reputable figure, to put it mildly, he has been a Republican insider, with access to the party’s top figures, over four decades. His credentials date back to Nixon’s Committee to Reelect The President and continue through the Reagan White House, the hard-fought Bush campaigns, and the Florida fiasco in 2000, when he masterminded the “Brooks Brothers riot” that shut down the Bush-Gore recount in Miami-Dade. Peruse his site and you’ll see his greatest hits and the attention he has drawn from major publications.
I’ve known Roger personally for years and always considered him intelligent and amusing; also extremely dangerous and even erratic. Sometimes I’ve been surprised by how much he knows about the inner-most workings of his party – even when he is clearly persona non grata among the current power elite.
Here is how Stone led his latest post, headlined “The Paul Ryan Selection, “which also delivers an amusing swipe at a certain Fox News analyst:
I’ve waited a few days to lay out my analysis of the selection of Paul Ryan for the VP slot on the Romney ticket. Unlike politicos like Dick Morris who badmouths the selection privately and shills for it publicly, I’ll tell you what I really think. My sources tell me David Koch played a key role in Ryan’s selection and that Koch’s wife Julia had been quietly lobbying for Ryan. The selection was cemented at the July 22nd fundraiser Koch held for Romney at the former’s sumptuous Hamptons estate. Koch pledged $100 million more to C-4 and Super PAC efforts for Romney [in exchange] for Ryan’s selection.
When he mentions “C-4,” of course, Stone is referring to the tax-exempt non-profit groups recognized by the IRS under section 501-C-4 of federal tax law – such as Americans For Prosperity, a group largely backed by the Koch brothers that has so far spent nearly $20 million on this year’s campaign. The C-4 groups, including another known as Crossroads GPS run by Karl Rove, need not disclose their rich donors, while Super PACs do. This year, the right-wing C-4s are outspending all the SuperPACS combined, as Pro Publica reported recently.
As a declared supporter of Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico, Stone is grinding a sizeable ax, as always. He goes on to denigrate the idea that Ryan is a libertarian, despite his declared idolatry of the late Ayn Rand. Not much more can be said about Stone’s stark allegations, unless more evidence emerges to confirm them. But there is nevertheless a ring of candor in Stone’s story, tying the plutocratic Kochs to the plutocratic ticket of Romney-Ryan.
What he has written amounts to a gleeful felony indictment of everyone involved. Will any of them demand a retraction or even issue a denial?
By: Joe Conason, The National Memo, August 18, 2012
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