The Mendacity of Mitt

If Mitt Romney were a Disney character . . . .

Despite what Mitt Romney would have you believe about the “vast left-wing conspiracy” made up of reporters “inclined to do the president’s bidding” against him, the media’s self-appointed fact-checkers go pretty easy on the Massachusetts millionaire. Even when outfits like PolitiFact and the Washington Post’s Fact Checker debunk a massaged statistic or blatant lie – women account for 92% of the jobs lost under Obama; if we re-elect the president, “Iran will have a nuclear weapon” – they tend to ignore the fact that Romney’s own policies wouldn’t have made the situation in question any better, and in some cases would actually have made it worse: Cuts to the government workforce would have disparately impacted women, and sanctions backed by the threat of military action sound a lot like Romney’s own approach to Iran. Media watchdogs point out that the Romney-approved Ryan budget fails Basic Accounting 101 but neglect to offer the most damning discrepancy: Ryan promises to hold discretionary spending to 3.75% of GDP by 2050, while Romney refuses to let military spending alone fall below 4.00%. Romney is taken to task for claiming that Obama has made the recession worse (quick unemployment rate test: is 8.2% greater or less than 10.0%?), but less often is it noted that, without the stimulus package unanimously opposed by Republicans, 2 million fewer people would have jobs.

So it’s disappointing, but hardly surprising, to see Glenn “Fact Checker” Kessler’s verdict on the latest Romney falsehood. In the Post’s cutesy version of the Truth-o-Meter, Romney’s criticism of Obama’s (supposedly) expanding bureaucracy is awarded two “Pinocchios.” Speaking to the National Rifle Association (to which Romney claims to have been “a lifelong member”) on April 13, he said:

Today, our freedom is never safe – because unelected, unaccountable regulators are always on the prowl. And under President Obama, they are multiplying. The number of federal employees has grown by almost 150,000 under this president.

Kessler is suspicious of this claim, as “it seems to fit into the Republican narrative of out-of-control growth in government under Obama.” He continues: “But context is important. Romney’s phrasing suggests that many of these new employees are ‘unelected, unaccountable regulators.’ Is this the case?”

Well, not exactly. The number of federal employees has indeed increased by about 146,000 since Obama took office, but the implication that these employees are rule-producing, bean-counting regulators “starts to fall apart when you dig deeper into the data.” The bulk of these new hires — a whopping 138,000 of them — are related to national defense, the one area of government that Romney proposes not to cut or maintain but to expand. Kessler does an admirable job of breaking down the numbers:

Comparing the September 2008 figures with December 2011 figures, the data show a gain of 80,000 jobs in the Department of Defense. The Veterans Affairs Department — not just the hospitals — added 38,000 people. The Department of Homeland Security added 20,000 jobs — and those positions are more likely to be border control agents than “regulators.”

What he doesn’t mention is that, using Romney’s slippery definition, a Romney administration would see an explosion of “unaccountable regulators.” Turnabout is fair play, and if Romney wants to lump Defense Department employees in with the rest of the bureaucracy, we can only conclude that the number of federal employees would skyrocket under a President Romney. Just as the candidate’s economic policies would have laid off more women, not fewer, his national security policies would lead to a larger federal government, not a smaller one. Yet Kessler neglects to mention this in his otherwise rational attempt to set the record straight.

Let’s take a look at Romney’s plans for the military. The candidate’s website (off topic, but this guy is worth $250 million, yet couldn’t buy Romney.com from some lame IT outfit?) pans the president for putting the country “on a course toward a ‘hollow’ force.” In a January debate, Romney repeated one of his favorite lines: “Our Navy is smaller than it’s been since 1917. Our Air Force is smaller and older than any time since 1947. We are cutting our number of troops.” PolitiFact awarded Romney’s statements about the size of the Navy its “Pants on Fire” rating, observing that technological developments make a straight comparison of ship numbers irrelevant, but given Romney’s recent remarks, his lament about “cutting our number of troops” is even more ridiculous. Laying out his plans for the Department of Defense on his website, Romney promises to “find efficiencies” in the agency’s budget that can be “reinvested into the force.” He writes:

The Department’s bureaucracy is bloated . . . . In the years since 2000, the Pentagon’s civilian staff grew by 20 percent while our active duty fighting force grew by only 3.4 percent. That imbalance needs to be rectified.

Presumably, this imbalance would be rectified by hiring more active-duty troops. More soldiers would also be necessary to fulfill the candidate’s intentions in Iraq. “Reports indicate that President Obama is seeking to keep 3,000 troops in the country after 2011,” states the white paper available at MittRomney.com, “a number far below the reported 14,000 to 18,000 our commanders in the field have recommended as the minimum necessary to carry out our mission.” Add those 18,000 troops to the 30,000-strong surge force that Romney wants to maintain in Afghanistan past the current withdrawal planned for September 2012, and we’re talking about a lot of “regulators” on the job in a Romney administration.

Romney disparages “Obama-era defense cuts” at every turn without acknowledging two inconvenient facts: First, the Pentagon’s budget has increased every year under Obama; and second, the looming “defense cuts” are the product of the Republican-approved budget deal dictated by Congress, not the White House. PolitiFact notes that “when the House voted on the Budget Control Act, Republicans voted for it by a 174-66 margin, and when it came up in the Senate, Republicans voted for it by a 28-19 margin.” When Romney claims “the president is planning on cutting $1 trillion out of military spending,” he misattributes the cuts; in fact, Obama’s Secretary of Defense has explicitly rejected the nearly $1 trillion in cuts required by the failure of the “supercomitttee” and the budget deal.

Fact-checkers tend to tackle Romney’s falsehoods on a case-by-case basis, an approach which obscures the candidate lies with a near-pathological regularity and ease. To look at his corpus of misstatements as a whole, as various bloggers have attempted to do, is to marvel at just how prolific a liar Romney truly is. Steve Benen, who blogs at Rachel Maddow’s website, is up to Vol. XIV of his weekly chronicle of Romney’s lies. (Benen is not for the faint of heart: the latest installment contains 21 examples, from the assertion that Obama promised to keep unemployment below 8% to the claim that John Kerry only released two years of taxes). Beyond liberal bloggers, however, the media has been almost criminally inert in the face of political lies. Even the New York Times, for all its hand-wringing over “truth vigilantes,” is a lapdog, not a pitbull. This reluctance to confront dishonesty head-on was on painful and ironic display in the coverage of Romney’s speech to the Newspaper Association of America. You would think that, out of a roomful of reporters, there would be at least one person willing to challenge demonstrably false statements like “Obama is the only president to ever cut $500 billion from Medicare.” Apparently not. Accounts of the speech featured such headlines as “Romney sharpens criticism of Obama” and “Romney blasts Obama’s ‘hide and seek’ presidency,” bringing to mind a long-standing complaint from the left: If a Republican claims the sky is green, the next morning’s papers will report, “Controversy Erupts Over Color of Sky.” The only articles pointing out Romney’s deceptive rhetoric engaged in the age-old practice of false equivalency, leading Mother Jones’ David Corn to write:

AP also ran a story noting that both Obama and Romney had “warped some realities” in recent speeches. But that article failed to note that the examples it listed for Obama had the president (arguably) spinning political characterizations in his favor, while the Romney examples were flat-out untrue assertions Romney made regarding Obama.

Corn, like most liberal critics, has few kind words for the mainstream media. “Romney stood before a gathering of journalists,” he writes. “He made a series of incorrect and dishonest accusations. And he was not hooted out of the room.”

But the so-called “MSM,” despite derision by both the right (which prefers the Palin-coined term “lamestream media”) and left, has not been completely passive. Though newsrooms continue to shirk the “afflicting the comfortable” half of Finley Peter Dunne‘s exhortation to the press, opinion writers have been less sanguine. Paul Krugman, regularly accused of being “mean” to the economists and politicians he accuses of peddling snake oil, writes:

Mitt Romney’s campaign is setting new standards in serial dishonesty. Really. He makes Bush look like a font of truth and accuracy.

Roger Cohen of the Washington Post is the latest establishment pundit to take on Romney’s silver tongue. His Tuesday column contends that Romney’s mendacity is “the reason he will be such a formidable general-election candidate.” Cohen writes that ” I admire a smooth liar, and Romney is among the best.” Though Obama occasionally stretches the truth as well, Romney is in a league of his own. Cohen’s column is worth quoting at length:

But where Romney is different is that he is not honest about himself. He could, as he did just recently, stand before the National Rifle Association as if he were, in spirit as well as membership, one of them. In body language, in the blinking of the eyes, in the nonexistent pounding pulse, there was not the tiniest suggestion that here was a man who just as confidently once embodied the anti-gun ethic of Massachusetts, the distant land he once governed. Instead, he tore into Obama for the (nonexistent) threat the president posed to Second Amendment rights — a false accusation from a false champion.

As a businessman, Romney has learned “that the truth is not always a moral obligation but sometimes merely what works.” He has a “businessman’s concept of self — that what he does is not who he is. This is what enables the slumlord to be a charitable man. This is what enables the corporate raider to endow his university . . . . Lying isn’t a sin. It’s a business plan.”

Ouch. Cohen is not usually so sharp-tongued. One of the Post’s more mild-mannered columnists, especially in contrast to vicious attack dogs like George Will and Charles Krauthammer, whose words drip with condescension toward the enemy (and opponents are always enemies, craven losers incapable of acting out of good intentions), Cohen usually produces pieces that create not a tempest but a ripple. Recent efforts include a personal reflection on meeting Dwight Eisenhower and a satirical take on the Secret Service prostitution scandal that is truly painful in its attempt to be clever. In this case, however, he pulls no punches, and the blows hit their target firmly in the solar plexus.

I only have one quibble with Cohen’s laceration of Mitt Romney’s character, and that is in his conclusion that Romney deserves a place in the Pantheon of liars. Romney is indeed skilled at small, everyday lies; he smoothly delivers outright falsehoods (“President Obama apologizes for America”) as self-evident facts. There is no Romney “tell” — nothing in his demeanor suggests he even knows he’s lying. No upward pitch to his voice, no reddened face; he is, in short, the consummate politician. But the former governor is less successful in convincing the public of the larger lies. Cohen describes his performance at the NRA convention with awe, yet Romney’s self-assured speech left many gun enthusiasts unimpressed. The Post quotes one convention attendee who says, “Do I think he’s truly a conservative — by that I mean someone who conserves the Constitution? No.” Romney is, this former Gingrich supporter confesses, “a little Etch-a-Sketchy.” The Times also talks to a skeptical NRA member: “He was for an assault weapons ban when he was Massachusetts governor. What changed? And how do we know he’s not going to change back?”

This lingering skepticism, despite a primary season in which Romney has tacked hard to the right, is evidence that even the professional liar may not be able to lie his way into the Oval Office. Conservatives are not convinced that the man who brought the individual mandate to Massachusetts can be trusted to repeal “Obamacare.” They don’t believe that a former supporter of abortion rights will really defund Planned Parenthood or appoint judges determined to overturn Roe v. Wade. Whether or not Romney is telling the truth when he claims to be “severely conservative,” Republican voters clearly think they’re being fed a line. If Romney were really as talented a liar as Cohen contends, he would have the Tea Party eating out of the palm of his hand. For all I know, Romney may not be lying at all on the big issues; perhaps he really did have a Road-to-Damascus moment that transformed him into a staunch rightwinger. Ironically, his odds in November may depend on his ability to convince the public that he is not such a great liar after all: that he isn’t sneaky enough to hide his true moderation behind a conservative façade. If Romney can’t do that, all the successful small-potato lies in the world won’t be enough to save him.