How Romney Keeps Lying Through His Big White Teeth
by Robert Reich
“We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers,” says Neil Newhouse, a Romney pollster.
A half dozen fact-checking organizations and websites have refuted Romney’s claims that Obama removed the work requirement from the welfare law and will cut Medicare benefits by $716 billion.
Last Sunday’s New York Times even reported on its front page that Romney has been “falsely charging” President Obama with removing the work requirement. Those are strong words from the venerable Times. Yet Romney is still making the false charge. Ads containing it continue to be aired.
Presumably the Romney campaign continues its false claims because they’re effective. But this raises a more basic question: How can they remain effective when they’ve been so overwhelmingly discredited by the media?
The answer is the Republican Party has developed three means of bypassing the mainstream media and its fact-checkers.
The first is by repeating big lies so often in TV spots – financed by a mountain of campaign money – that the public can no longer recall (if it ever knew) that the mainstream media and its fact-checkers have found them to be lies.
A series of court decisions and regulatory changes, beginning with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizen’s United vs. Federal Election Commission, opened the floodgates to big money. Fully a quarter of the $350 million amassed by Super PACs through the end of July came from just ten donors, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan group that tracks such spending.
And through political front groups masquerading as nonprofits charitable, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, corporations and Wall Street banks are making secret contributions — without even their own shareholders knowing.
The second means the GOP has developed to protect its lies is by discrediting the mainstream media – asserting it’s run by “liberal elites” that can’t be trusted to tell the truth. “I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans,” Newt Gingrich charged at a Republican debate last January, in what’s become a standard GOP attack line.
To be sure, the mainstream media hasn’t always called it correctly. Initially it bought the Bush administration’s claim there were “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq. But the mainstream media is at least committed to professional standards that separate truth from fiction, seek objective facts, correct errors, and disseminate the truth.
The third mechanism is by using its own misinformation outlets – led by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and his yell-radio imitators, book publisher Regnery, and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, along with a right-wing blogosphere – to spread the lies, or at least spread doubt about what’s true.
Together, these three mechanisms are creating a parallel Republican universe of Orwellian dimension – where anything can be asserted, where pollsters and political advisers are free to create whatever concoction of lies will help elect their candidate, and where “fact-checkers” are as irrelevant and intrusive as is the truth.
Democracy cannot thrive in such a place. To the contrary, history teaches that this is where demagogues take root.
The Romney campaign has decided it won’t be dictated by fact-checkers. But a society without trusted arbiters of what is true and what is false is vulnerable to every lie imaginable.
Robert Reich is Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School 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 Bill Clinton. He has written eleven books, including The Work of Nations, which has been translated into 22 languages; the best-sellers The Future of Success and Locked in the Cabinet, and his most recent book, Supercapitalism. His articles have appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. Mr. Reich is co-founding editor of The American Prospect magazine. His weekly commentaries on public radio’s "Marketplace" are heard by nearly five million people.
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As Josh Mandel (Treasurer, OH) recently said, “There is no downside to lying.”
Yes, the Treasurer sees no problem with lying. Um, a treasurer has control over state money. Wonder why Mandel was placed there?
Anybody interested in numbers? Ohio has cut funding to the most vulnerable populations since Gov Kasich was put into office by outside money.
How many Ohioan have been made homeless or have suffered and died for this corrupt adminstration? Ask Mandel, Mary Taylor (Insurance, Ohio) or Kasich. Those are numbers they would enjoy discussing, if they were aware of them at all. For them, that would be considered an accomplishment.
BTW wonder why there are so many loving, former pets dying on the streets now? People are going hungry and in the suburbs, too. The innocent are suffering and dying here. Facts tell that truth.
Always remember who caused it all: the corrupt outside influences here in Ohio and right before the election. Think “Washington DC reforms”, Ok?
Ohio is not fooled. I live here and I know all too well what this “Nation’s Worst Governor” is all about.
Know what this vicious activity leads to, besides an increase in crime in Ohio? A voter backlash.
Simply brilliant strategy, yes? Almost as good as Team Akin trying to justify rape.
Since many Ohioans know the truth, hope survives. This is a time of endurance and hanging on. Survival is a genuine triumph here in Ohio.
If this notorious Governor is not removed, more innocent people and animals will suffer and lives will be lost. We need media coverage here so the truth can be told. We do not need more corporate media fictions.
If the people left in Ohio can’t hang on, they will be forced to relocate if they can afford to or stay and fight. There is no choice for those determined to see reforms which may save this state and its residents from total ruin.
The choice is easy–reforms it is and choosing ethics over income. Sacrifice now or be dragged into the muck with these repeat offenders.
Like many Ohioans, I refuse to cooperate with those harming this state every day. I will not be pressured by those without ethics into doing anything which I feel is unfit.
From my own experience, I can assure anyone that cowards back down when confronted. First, they have to brought into the open. Media can help with that.