Take Barack Obama as an example.
In the aftermath of Wednesday night's debate in Denver, the President said this: “I met this very spirited fellow who claimed to be Mitt Romney. But it couldn’t be Mitt Romney, because the real Mitt Romney has been running around the country for the last year promising $5 trillion in tax cuts that favor the wealthy. The fellow onstage last night said he didn’t know anything about that.” The president went on to say, “The man onstage last night, he does not want to be held accountable for the real Mitt Romney’s decisions and what he’s been saying for the last year. And that’s because he knows full well that we don’t want what he’s been selling for the last year.” And President Obama went on "Governor Romney may dance around his positions, but if you want to be president, you owe the American people the truth."
Let's deal with these charges in turn.
The President's claim that Governor Romney has been going around the country for months calling for $5 trillion in tax cuts that favor the wealthy is pure fiction. Even President Obama's deputy campaign manager, Stephanie Cutter, admitted that the $5 trillion figure is inaccurate. What Governor Romney favors is a 20 percent cut in rates for everyone. But as Governor Romney explained to the President during the debate, he's committed to making his tax reform plan revenue-neutral by broadening the tax base and through the revenues generated from economic growth. So only if you intentionally ignore a key element of Mitt Romney's tax proposal do you get any revenue loss at all.
Governor Romney has raised several specific ideas on what the base broadening might include, including putting a fixed dollar-cap on deductions; or capping deductions as a percentage of adjusted gross income; or a tax reform modeled on the Bowles-Simpson Commission and the 1986 Tax Reform Act where specific tax loopholes are eliminated. Governor Romney fully recognizes, however, that any major overhaul of the tax system will result from a negotiation with Congressional leaders.
The truth is that Governor Romney is not just proposing a 20 percent tax rate cut. He's proposing a reform of the tax code that lowers the rate people pay on their income but increases the portion of their income subject to taxes.
What makes the false claim by President Obama doubly risible is that it came in the same debate in which Mr. Obama said, "I've put forward a specific $4 trillion deficit-reduction plan." But as any number of fact checkers (like Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post) have pointed out, the $4 trillion figures (a) counts $1 trillion in cuts reached a year ago in budget negotiations with Congress, meaning those savings are already in the bank; (b) counts $800 billion in savings in debt payments (from lower deficits) as a “spending cut,” which is a dubious claim; and (c) Obama is counting nearly a $1 trillion in savings from war money that no one expected to be spent anyway, now that the Iraq war is over and the Afghanistan war is winding down. As Mr. Kessler put it, "By projecting war spending far in the future, the administration is able to claim credit for saving money it never intended to spend. (Imagine taking credit for saving money on buying a new car every year, even though you intended to keep your car for 10 years.) Rather than good arithmetic, independent budget analysts called the maneuver 'a major budget gimmick.'” (Shockingly, the press has applied very little attention and scrutiny to President Obama’s invented claim that he’s put forward a specific $4 trillion deficit-reduction plan.)
There's also more than a little irony in having President Obama lecture Governor Romney about veracity in the aftermath of the indisputably misleading account by the President and his administration regarding the lethal assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.
On the matter of accountability that the President professes devotion to: As I’ve pointed out before, this is a president who promised to cut the deficit in half, bring down health care premiums by $2,500 for a typical family, create five million new green energy jobs alone, lift two million Americans from poverty, and as president-elect, informed us that he had asked two of his top economic advisers, Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein, to conduct a “rigorous analysis” of his economic recovery plan. The report that he released predicted unemployment would not rise above 8 percent if the stimulus plan was passed. None of those promises have been met. In fact, they have been utterly shattered.
I want to offer one more observation about Wednesday's debate. For the past four years, President Obama has relied to an inordinate degree on straw men and caricatures of the Republican Party and Governor Romney. What happened on Wednesday evening in Denver is that the President was actually called out on his distortions. Governor Romney carefully and patiently corrected Mr. Obama on issue after issue. The President didn't like it, and he proved entirely unequipped to respond to the points made by Governor Romney. As a result, he not only lost the debate; he was routed. But once President Obama was in front of a safe and supportive crowd, with no fear that his false claims would be refuted, he was back to doing what he does best: Misrepresenting the record and agenda of Governor Romney.
It is hard to believe now, but once upon a time, Barack Obama presented himself as a figure of intellectual integrity who would elevate public discourse. He's now been reduced to spewing distortions, and doing so in his typically mocking fashion. But maybe when a president doesn't have a record he can defend and a governing vision he can't articulate – when, like Robert Frost’s hired man, he has “nothing to look backward to with pride, and nothing to look forward to with hope" – that is what he's reduced to.
Perhaps it isn't a surprise, then, to see what President Obama has become. But it is nonetheless sad.
Peter Wehner, Senior Adviser for Romney for President, Inc.
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