Isn't Truth a "value" ? Romney Just Making Stuff Up Now

Isn't Truth a "value" ? Romney Just Making Stuff Up Now

A couple weeks ago, Mitt Romney quoted Noam Scheiber’s book about the Obama administration’s economic rescue, The Escape Artists, in a highly misleading way. Yesterday he did it again, only this time Romney altered his description so that whatever shred of truth that once existed in his telling is gone, and nothing remains but a pack of lies. Here’s Romney’s incredibly false account:

    A book that was written in a way that’s apparently pro-President Obama, was written by a guy named Noam Scheiber and in this book he says that there was a discussion about the fact that Obamacare would slow down the economic recovery in this country and they knew that before they passed it.  But they concluded that we would all forget how long the recovery took once it had happened, so they decided to go ahead.  The idea that they knowingly slowed down our recovery in order to put in place Obamacare, which they wanted and they considered historic but the American people did not want or consider historic, is something which I think deserves a lot of explaining …

The lies. Let us tote them up.

First, and most importantly, at no point did anybody in the Obama administration ever believe that passing the Affordable Care Act would “slow down the recovery.” Nothing close to that is ever described. Romney presents the book as revealing that Obama believed health-care reform, through its "big gummint" regulations, would harm the recovery, but cackling that he wanted to pass it out of some belief that Americans wouldn’t notice mass economic suffering. This bears no relationship to anything the book says.

In the book, Noam Scheiber asked Larry Summers if he believed that the decision to pass health-care reform cost Obama the chance to pass a second stimulus, and thus came at the cost of a faster recovery. Summers answered that he did not think the health-care law prevented a second stimulus, but that even if that were the case, he would have supported it anyway.

Not only is it false for Romney to say Obama “knowingly slowed down our recovery,” it’s not even true that Obama knowingly passed up a chance to accelerate the recovery. The notion that anybody in the administration believed that the health-care law would actually slow down the recovery is complete fiction. It does not appear in the book anywhere and it’s pretty obviously untrue.

What’s more, the notion that the book is “pro-President Obama,” and hence some damning indictment that slipped into a laudatory account, is also wrong. You don’t have to read the book to know this. You don’t even need to listen to my account (I have read it). All you need to do is read all the way to the book’s subtitle: “How Obama’s Team Fumbled the Recovery.” That is not the subtitle of a laudatory book.

Noam — not Obama or his aides — believes that Obama should have shelved health-care reform in order to pass more stimulus. I’ll note that, according to Romney’s most frequently professed theory, stimulus made the recovery slower. (“[Obama] bailed out the public sector, gave billions of dollars to the companies of his friends, and added almost as much debt as all the prior presidents combined. The consequence is that we are enduring the most tepid recovery in modern history.”) So, by Romney’s analysis, shelving health-care reform to pass a second stimulus would have slowed down the recovery even more.

Having stripped away the multiple layers of distortion Romney has coated onto his account, at the bottom there is actually an intellectually interesting question. Did Obama blow it by turning to health-care reform rather than passing a second stimulus? That’s the case Noam makes in his book (though it’s primarily a narrative rather than an argument), and has continued to press. If Obama loses his reelection bid, some version of this will become the primary liberal narrative: He failed because he neglected to get enough stimulus.

Romney cannot even get the facts about the Recovery Act (stimulus) correct. The CBO and the vast majority of economists think the economy would be in much worse shape down than if no Recovery Act was passed ( see chart above for differences in impact on GDP before and after stimulus) & here: CBO Director Demolishes GOP's Stimulus Myth. Another irony is that Romney is claiming he did not create many jobs as governor because he inherited a bad economy( from his conservative predecessor by the way) - Obama inherited the worse economy since the Great Depression so the worse Conservatives can say is that Democrats did not fix the giant cluster fu*k Republicans gave the country fast enough.