MORNING MESSAGE: Romney and the Republican Memory Hole
OurFuture.org's Robert Borosage: "'Every small business wanted these to be their best years ever' … Say what? Obama inherited an economy in free fall, losing 750,000 jobs a month, with recession spreading across the world … We weren’t looking for the 'best years ever;' we were looking for help. Consigning this reality to the memory hole serves many purposes. It allows Republicans to pretend that Obama caused the mess. It makes it easier to make the preposterous claim that the stimulus made things worse. It allows Republicans like Paul Ryan who championed every catastrophe of the Bush years to be born in innocence again … Most important, if the Great Recession weren’t air brushed out of history, conservatives would have to rethink what they believe."
Romney Makes Speech, Says Nothing
Romney says next to nothing about what he would actually do. Daily Beast's Peter Beinart: "Yes, Romney said again and again that he knows how business works and Obama doesn’t, and thus, that he can create jobs. But he said almost nothing about how he’d change America’s tax code or its health-care system or its regulatory apparatus. He barely hit the core Tea Party themes of freedom versus entitlement that Ryan has made central to the campaign. In his speech, Ryan told Democrats to bring on the Medicare fight. In his, Romney largely ducked it."
"Personal Details Were Not the Answer" says TNR'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."
Romney's jobs pledge is strikingly empty. TNR's Jonathan Cohn: "…Romney vowed once again to create 12 million jobs in the next four years. That sounds like a big number. But, as several economists have pointed out, 12 million new jobs is what many models already predict the economy will produce."
Ratings way down for night of Ryan speech, compared to Palin's night four years ago. W. Post: "… just over 20 million people were watching last night on the Nielsen-rated networks, compared to 37 million for night two of the RNC in 2008."
But The Lying Doesn't Stop
Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod uses the "L" word. NYT: "'It’s sort of breathtaking that Paul Ryan made a whole speech about being truthful and making hard choices and yet he never mentioned a single idea of theirs … They’ve spent an entire week not talking about their ideas because they know their ideas are unpopular,' [said Axelrod]. But worse than what Republicans have not said, Mr. 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."
NYT headlines "Facts Take a Beating" in Romney and Ryan speeches: "The two speeches — peppered with statements that were incorrect or incomplete — seemed to signal the arrival of a new kind of presidential campaign, one in which concerns about fact-checking have been largely set aside."
Yes, they will kill Medicare, says NYT's Paul Krugman: "The question now is whether voters will understand what’s really going on (which depends to a large extent on whether the news media do their jobs). 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?"
Ryan keeps lying about GM plant closure. NY Mag's Margaret Hartmann: "[CNN's Wolf] Blizter noted that the announcement that the plant was shutting down came in June 2008, months before Obama was even elected. 'Well, it's still idle,' said Ryan … 'He put his policies in place and the plant still shut down.' … So Ryan didn't mean to imply that the plant's closure was the president's fault, he's just upset that Obama broke a promise that would have been physically impossible to keep, thanks to circumstances beyond his control."
