A pro-Romney group is savaging Newt Gingrich with TV ads and mailers to Iowa Republicans. Gingrich dismisses the attacks as “lies.” We find that some of the claims from Restore Our Future are indeed distorted, false or misleading. But several are also right on target.
Michele Bachmann argued that “my facts are accurate” at the Dec. 15 debate, but a few days later, she got several facts wrong. On “Meet the Press” the presidential candidate had a couple of exchanges with host David Gregory over the validity of her statements on Social Security and the debt. Among the inaccuracies:
Bachmann said she didn’t support the payroll tax cut because “it denied $111 billion to the Social Security trust fund”and “put senior citizens at risk.”
The six Republican presidential candidates who are set to meet and debate again on Dec. 10 have all made some claims that don’t line up with the facts. Will they repeat this shopworn spin, or have they tired of these talking points? Here’s what to watch and listen for when they gather in Des Moines for the latest debate — sponsored by ABC News, Yahoo! News, the Des Moines Register, local WOI-TV and the Republican Party of Iowa:
Gingrich: Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has boasted several times that he “helped balance the federal budget for four straight years.” But he was in Congress for only two of those years.
The same old claims about the federal health care law turn up once again in an ad featuring pop and gospel singer Pat Boone, the national spokesman for the conservative 60 Plus Association.
The group says it’s spending $750,000 to air the minute-long ad in Ohio, and the spot had already aired 459 times as of Nov. 14, according to Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group. It attacks Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, with Boone telling viewers to call Brown and “urge him to support real Medicare reform and protect our seniors.”
Herman Cain has offered an alternate version of history in claiming that Planned Parenthood’s founder wanted to prevent “black babies from being born.” We find no support for that old claim. Cain also states that the organization built 75 percent of its clinics in black communities, but there’s no evidence that was true then. And today, only 9 percent of U.S. abortion clinics are in neighborhoods where half or more of residents are black, according to the most recent statistics.
Texas Gov. Rick Perry is claiming that Mitt Romney “OKd health care for illegal immigrants” by signing Massachusetts’ 2006 health care overhaul law. But the law didn’t give illegal immigrants anything new. It merely continued and renamed a state program that had long allowed low-income, uninsured residents, including those in the country illegally, to get care at community health centers and (as in all other states) hospital emergency rooms.
Perry’s campaign seized on an Oct. 23 Los Angeles Times story that said the law Romney signed “includes a program known as the Health Safety Net,
Health insurance premiums for employer-sponsored family plans jumped a startling 9 percent from 2010 to 2011, and Republicans have blamed the federal health care law. But they exaggerate. The law — the bulk of which has yet to be implemented — has caused only about a 1 percent …
At the latest debate, the Republican presidential candidates repeated several claims they’ve made before. The candidates participated in a roundtable-style discussion at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where they reiterated false and misleading lines about the federal health care law, the debt ceiling debate, job creation and more:
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney repeated his talking point that the health care law in his state only affected 8 percent of the population — or just the uninsured —
The Perry campaign has been pushing a questionable claim that the Massachusetts health care law, signed by then-Gov. Mitt Romney in 2006, “killed 18,000 jobs.” But that number was churned out by an economic model used by a conservative think tank, and it’s unknown whether the figure is accurate.
At last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Texas Gov. Rick Perry said: “If Romneycare cost Massachusetts 18,000 jobs, just think what it would do to this country.”
Republican-leaning group formed by Iowa political figures.