Latest Obama Anti-Romney Ad Rates Slam From Washington Post

It’s bad enough when campaigns stretch the truth. It’s another when they break it, stomp on it, cut it up into little pieces, and then glue it back together until it is unrecognizable. Such is the case with the Obama campaign’s latest anti-Romney ad. Its untruthfulness is so blatant that even the Washington Post Fact Checker blog gives it a rating of four Pinocchios.

As Fact Checker states:

The Obama campaign fails to make its case. On just about every level, this ad is misleading, unfair and untrue, from the use of “corporate raider” to its examples of alleged outsourcing. Simply repeating the same debunked claims won’t make them any more correct.

When the Washington Post is slamming their favorite president’s campaign ad, you know it’s bad. WaPo has been in the pocket for Obama since he first decided to run for president. That one of its house organs is calling “Bull***t!” on his latest campaign ad is indicative that the love affair with Obama may be coming to an end.

One example of the ad’s falsehoods:

The claim that Romney outsourced jobs as governor is equally overblown.

This concerns Romney’s veto of a bill that would have prohibited Massachusetts from contracting with companies that outsourced the state’s work to other countries. Lawmakers were especially concerned about a $160,000-a-month contract with Citigroup to operate a system of electronic food-stamp cards that included a customer phone service center in India.

Both the liberal editorial page of the Boston Globe and conservative editorial page of the Boston Herald urged Romney to veto the amendment, saying it would cost the state money. Romney agreed, saying the measure did not protect state jobs — the call center might have moved from India to another state — but “had the potential of costing our citizens a lot more money.” The Democratic-dominated Massachusetts legislature did not override his veto, even though it overturned 117 others, suggesting that there was little real support for the measure.

When the food-stamp contract expired, the Massachusetts Department of Transitional Assistance insisted that those jobs be returned to the United States. But they ended up in a call center based in Utah — just as Romney had predicted.

One of the more telling parts of the quote above? “The Democratic-dominated Massachusetts legislature did not override his veto, even though it overturned 117 others.”

Most people either don’t know or don’t care that the Massachusetts legislature has had Democrat super-majorities in both the House and the Senate for years, making anything the then-governor wanted to do very difficult. His few successes in wrangling the legislature to his way of thinking ended up helping the Massachusetts economy. On the other hand the state legislature did its darnedest to burden the state economy with higher taxes, more regulation, and greater disincentives for businesses to expand or even remain in Massachusetts. Knowing this, the fact that the legislature overrode 117 of his vetoes ought to tell us something – it was the legislature that was likely at fault for the problems Obama’s campaign is attributing to Romney.

But let’s not let the facts get in the way of an untruthful attack ad.