By Bill Adair
Published on Thursday, November 1st, 2012 at 4:00 a.m.
The 2012 presidential campaign has given the Truth-O-Meter quite a workout.
We’ve published more than 800 fact-checks on the presidential race
about everything from Chinese windmills to Big Bird. We checked claims
from more than 20 debates, the two party conventions and dozens of TV
ads.
With the campaign winding down, we’ve selected the biggest falsehoods
from the candidates, the parties and the super PACs. We chose three from
each side.
(This list is just for the presidential race. In December, we’ll
consider all claims we've checked from all of our websites to select our
2012 Lie of the Year.)
Republicans
Obama ended work requirements for welfare -- In
August, Mitt Romney’s campaign released ads that claimed that under
President Barack Obama’s welfare plan, "you wouldn’t have to work and
wouldn’t have to train for a job. They just send you your welfare
check."
But we found that isn't the Obama administration's plan. The
administration memo the Romney campaign cited as evidence said that
states would have flexibility to comply with federal work requirements.
The underlying principle is still to get welfare recipients to work, not
to abolish the work requirement.
Pants on Fire!
Obama went on an "apology tour" -- This one has been
around since early 2010, when Romney released his book No Apology. In
the book -- and in many speeches and debates since then -- Romney has
said that Obama has showed weakness because he began his presidency with
a series of speeches around the world that "apologized for America."
We examined the speeches in detail and found Obama never said he was
sorry or used other words that indicate remorse. We sent the speeches to
experts on foreign policy and apologies and most concurred that the
speeches were not apologies. So we rated Romney's claim
Pants on Fire!
Romney continues to make the claim. He repeated it in the final
presidential debate and then, the next day, released a Web ad titled
"Apology Tour."
Obama to business owners: "You didn’t build that!" --
One of the most popular Republican attacks of the 2012 campaign has been
to repeat a line from Obama: "You didn’t build that." Throughout the
summer and at the GOP convention in Tampa, Romney and other Republicans
cited the line as evidence that Obama believes that people don’t create
their own businesses. Romney said Obama was saying that success "is the
result of government," not "hard-working people."
We examined the full context of Obama’s remarks and concluded that
Romney was distorting the meaning. He plucked two sentences out of
context and ignored Obama’s broader point about the common need for
infrastructure and education. Romney also ignored Obama’s summary, in
which he said: "The point is...that when we succeed, we succeed because
of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together."
We rated Romney’s claim
False.
Democrats
A man’s wife died of cancer because Romney's company laid him off -- Romney
often cites his work at Bain Capital as valuable private-sector
experience, but Democrats and the Obama campaign have highlighted
companies that failed after being bought by Bain.
A tear-jerker ad from Priorities USA Action, a pro-Obama super PAC,
made the most over-the-top claim about Bain by suggesting that because
it bought a steel company, the wife of an employee died of cancer.
The ad’s logic was that Bain made millions from buying GST Steel but
eventually had to shut down the company’s plant, leaving 750 workers
without jobs -- and without health insurance. One of those workers was
Joe Soptic, who is shown in the ad saying, "A short time after that, my
wife became ill." She later died.
But the ad collapses the time frame in a misleading way. The illness
was in 2006, five years after Soptic lost his job, and her lack of
coverage was not due solely to her husband losing her health insurance.
We also found there were other factors in the plant’s closing other than
the acquisition by Bain. We rated the claim
False.
Romney doesn’t pay taxes -- Democrats have pounded the
drumbeat for Romney to release more tax returns, but with little
success. Last summer, Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid filled the
void with a tantalizing tidbit: He said a Bain investor told him that
Romney hadn’t paid any taxes for 10 years.
The problem was, Reid did not identify the source and there was no
proof to back up such a bold claim. We examined tax data and talked with
experts and found that given the nature of Romney’s income and
investments, it was highly unlikely he paid no taxes. With no solid
evidence to back up such an outrageous claim, we rated it
Pants on Fire! Romney’s tax advisers later
released a summary detailing the taxes he’s paid during the past 20 years.
Romney "likes to fire people" -- In their effort to
portray Romney as a heartless capitalist, Democrats have used the attack
line that he has said he "likes to fire people." Delaware Gov. Jack
Markell used it at the Democratic National Convention, saying that is
Romney’s approach for jobless workers.
But we found that was a serious distortion of Romney’s remarks, which
were made during a speech to the Nashua, N.H., Chamber of Commerce. He
was referring to what people should do if they don’t like their health
insurance company. "I like being able to fire people who provide
services to me," he said. "You know, if someone doesn’t give me a good
service that I need, I want to say I’m going to go get someone else to
provide that service to me."
We found it was inaccurate to say Romney was referring to jobless workers. We rated the claim
