Desperate Obama Can't Attack Romney Without Lying: Another Four Pinnochios From the Washington Post

They just got four Pinnochios for calling Romney a "corporate raider," a term with a pretty well understood meaning (quick hostile takeover, loot the assets) which simply doesn't apply to Bain.

And now a bullshit claim about Romney's job creation figures as Massachusetts governor.

Pfliffle claimed that for every private sector job created in Massachusetts under Romney, six public sector jobs were created.

As for Plouffe’s claim about the Bay State’s employment gains, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show Massachusetts added 22,400 private-sector jobs during Romney’s tenure. That means the state would need to have created 134,400 public-sector jobs in the same period for the White House adviser’s claim to be true.

That’s not even close to what happened. Massachusetts gained just 5,300 state-government jobs while Romney was in office. As such, the state added more than four private-sector jobs for every state-government job. This is pretty much the reverse of what Plouffe claimed.

The best reasoning we could find to support Plouffe’s claim is that the rate of public-sector job growth for the state (4.7 percent) was about six times that of private-sector gains (.79 percent) during Romney’s tenure. But this is very different from having six times the number of new government jobs, which is what the White House adviser clearly implied when he said, “for every private-sector job created in Massachusetts by Governor Romney, six public sector jobs.”

...

In this regard, the state added more than 11 private-sector jobs for every government job. Again, this contradicts what Plouffe said.

It's good to see the press occasionally do their job, and it's good to see the Obama administration sweating so badly. You don't trot out weaksauce like this if you've got anything good.

Now, Obama does have something strong: Mediscare. And he'll unveil that when the public's paying attention, and no one should be surprised when he does.

And we'll have to see how that works out for him. Given that Obama stole $500 billion from Medicare to fund ObamaCare (and Romney loves saying so), his narrative on "protecting Medicare" is going to be a little nuanced.

But this crap is currently their best possible line of attack, and it's weak, and makes Obama look even worse than he already does. He looks a like a loser soaked in flop-sweat, and no one is ever going to think of his pledge to transcend petty, nasty politics without a rueful chuckle.

posted by Ace at 03:27 PM

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