In Romney and Obama Speeches, Selective Truths

by PETER BAKER and MICHAEL COOPER, nytimes.com
June 19th 2012

Mitt Romney, left, and President Obama have been selectively inserting key figures and facts into their stump speeches in an effort to enhance their campaign's case.

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To listen to Mitt Romney tell it, President Obama is a job-killing, free-spending, big-government liberal who made the recession worse with his policies and endangered free-market capitalism. The president has spent tax dollars "at a pace without precedent in recent history," Mr. Romney says, and "added almost as much debt as all the prior presidents combined."

As Mr. Obama travels the country, he offers the opposite self-portrait, that of a job-creating, tightfisted, government-shrinking pragmatist who saved the country from another Great Depression. On his watch, "government employment has gone down," he says, and federal spending has increased "at the lowest pace in nearly 60 years."

With the presidential race largely focused on the economy and the budget, Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney are filling speeches with facts and figures designed to enhance their case and diminish the other guy's, in the process often making assertions fundamentally at odds with one another. Along the way, both candidates are at times stretching the truth, using statistics without context, exaggerating their own records and misrepresenting their opponent's.

Each side regularly accuses the other of lying, and in any campaign there is a temptation to write both sides off, as if every misleading statement were equivalent. In reality, some are more fundamental than others, more egregious, more central to the larger argument. Mr. Romney, for example, called his 2010 book laying out the rationale for his candidacy "No Apology" — charging, falsely in the eyes of many independent fact-checkers, that Mr. Obama had traveled the world apologizing for America.

But determining who is the worse dissembler can be a subjective exercise, even in an age when news organizations, blogs and partisan groups blitz out regular fact-checks. When PolitiFact, the Pulitzer-winning project of The Tampa Bay Times, evaluated the statements, it found that more of Mr. Romney's were misleading than Mr. Obama's. Glenn Kessler's Fact Checker column at The Washington Post, on the other hand, has awarded roughly the same average "Pinocchio scores" — his measure of falsity — to both men.

Sometimes the truth or dishonesty of an assertion depends on definitions or on when you start counting. When it comes to unemployment, for instance, Mr. Romney counts from the month when Mr. Obama took office and inherited an economy that was hemorrhaging jobs at historic rates. Mr. Obama prefers to count from 2010, when his policies arguably had started to take effect and the job picture had begun turning around, eschewing blame for the losses at the start of his term.

But one thing is clear: While they claim distance from typical Washington politics, both men have mastered the ancient Washington art of selective storytelling.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 19, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated the total national debt. It is $15.8 trillion, not $15.7 trillion.

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