TAMPA, Fla. – Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech at the GOP convention here Aug. 30 confirmed once again his apparent decision to lie his way into the presidency of the United States.
“They’ve spent an entire week not talking about their ideas,” said Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod after the Romney speech, “because they know their ideas are unpopular.
“But worse than what Republicans have not said,” Axelrod added, “is what Mr. Romney and Mr. Ryan have said: a compendium of demonstrable lies. It’s lying as a campaign strategy. The number of falsehoods and misleading statements from the Romney campaign coming in for independent criticism has reached a level not typically seen.”
Romney, hoping voters will forget his plan to voucherize Medicare, repeated the lie that President Obama has taken $700 million from seniors to fund the Affordable Health Care Act.
It is the Republicans who will kill Medicare, said Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman after the Romney speech. “The question now is whether voters will understand what’s really going on. Mr. Ryan and his party are betting that they can bluster their way through this, pretending that they are the real defenders of Medicare even as they work to kill it. Will they get away with it?”
“Romney said next to nothing about what he would actually do,” wrote the Daily Beast’s Peter Beinart after the speech.
The GOP nominee described in his speech how his father had placed a rose in his mother’s bedroom every morning and how, on the day that she saw no rose she realized her husband was dead.
“Personal details were not the answer,” wrote TBR’s Noam Scheiber. “I don’t think I’ve seen a better Romney delivery this campaign. But they all suffered from the same basic flaw: Though they succeeded in showing a bit of humanity, they never connected that humanity to what he might do as president.”
The Romney lies last night came in a variety of ways.
He again vowed, for example, to create 12 million jobs in the next four years without, of course, explaining how. Most economists agree, however, that 12 million jobs are what the economy will produce over the next four years even if nothing is done to stimulate the economy.
Jackie Tortora, a spokesperson for the AFL-CIO’s political action department, noted contradictions in Romney’s speech: “He touted his business experience, despite his business record as an outsourcer. He called out divisiveness, despite proposals that would provide bigger income disparities and he ignored Republican obstructionism for the past two years.
“Although Romney claims he would reduce the deficit and balance the budget he has no plans to end the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, which is the major contributor to the deficit, and tax analysts say his plan to overhaul the tax code doesn’t add up.
“We need solutions that strengthen the economy, health care and education for working families,” said Tortora, “not a Romney-Ryan plan that betters the 1 percent at the expense of everyone else.”
Pro-labor analysts say the Romney-Ryan vision is one of tax breaks for the rich and corporations paid for by cuts in Social Security, Medicare and other programs for seniors, the poor and working-class families. It is paid for, they note, with cuts to meaningful investments in the future.
Romney spoke movingly last night of how Neil Armstrong, “a real American,” was first on the moon and how the American flag he planted there was still standing. He failed to mention NASA, the massive government program that got astronauts to the moon, however, and he failed to mention how the economy, including private business, continues to benefit today from the job creation and the technology that came out of the space program.
Photo: Protesters marching in a parade during the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., August 29. Alex Menendez/AP
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