Romney Hopes He Can Win the White House With Just Two Lies

Lie One:

Romney keeps claiming that his profit-taking through leveraged buyouts and downsizing and outsourcing by his vulture-fraudster firm Bain Capital somehow created "one hundred thousand jobs."

Although it is easy to document the job losses Romney profited from, nobody can seem to substantiate the job creation claims and the unaccountable SuperPAC making the claims so far has refused to indicate on what they are based.

Rather than patiently debunking this claim over and over again while tut tutting its hypocrisy -- most of which debunking will be ignored anyway while Romney surrogates will simply repeat the "100,000 Jobs Created" claim over and over until all the so-called "Independent Voters" (very few of whom has ever had an independent thought in his life, and none of whom ever voted on the basis of one) treat it as an article of unassailable faith -- it seems to me the best response will be to show the crying, distressed, angry faces of people (let's make most of them white, shall we?) who have been fired without notice after life-long service to the companies Bain bought out and looted for cash. Teary faces, not facts, will jam the Romney lie. For example:


Ted Kennedy has already done much of the work for us. Although, when it comes to pictures that say more than words can, it must be admitted that Romney has done much of the work for us, too.

Lie Two:

Romney keeps claiming that Obama has lost this country two million jobs.

The left-wonk blogipelago seem enormously excited to debunk this claim by fixing their attention on the term "net job loss" as opposed to monthly job gains since Obama's stimulus and other policies have gone into effect (usually in the face of unprecedented profoundly irresponsible Republican obstruction explicitly designed to make Obama a one-term President no matter how many millions of Americans who work for a living have to suffer needlessly as a result). While all this is exactly true and right, it is also guaranteed on these terms to lull most Americans to sleep, whether they think of themselves as "Independent" or not.

Again, rather than exposing what is misleading about Romney's claim through the patient delineation of a distinction between "net loss" and "monthly gains" it seems to me the best response will simply be say Obama inherited the worst economy since the Depression from the Republicans (which is not only true but also widely believed by Americans, and so should simply be repeated as often or more often than Romney's "Obama lost two million jobs" claim to see to it that they keep remembering what they already know) and then show this simple graph that Steve Benen likes to whip out on a nearly daily basis (as he should and so should we all):

while saying, in exactly Benen's words, although a calliope or ukulele in the background would be a nice addition:

“A” marks where we were when the economy crashed, and the “B” marks were we are now. Why, exactly, does Romney think “B” is worse than “A”?

Romney plans to win the White House by telling two lies and then spending enough money to make the two lies stick.

I think the best way to obliterate Romney's first lie ("I created one hundred thousand jobs") is with empathy for the suffering faces of those whose jobs he callously destroyed for profit, while the best way to obliterate Romney's second lie ("Obama lost two million jobs") is with derision at his facile effort to misread an obvious graph.

What I would stress is that we should avoid the effort at patient explanation and debunking that is as much about feeling clever as revealing the truth. Romney's lies will be told in slogans a few syllables long. Their repetition will create the reality on the foundation of which Romney will seek to win the White House. Our responses must be comparably pithy and more visceral. If they are, Romney's defenses and rationalizations and qualifications will become long and convoluted and his innate flip-floppery and flim-flammery will come to the fore.

Our debunking should not be long and patient, his justifications should be. We must short circuit those lies, not engage them on their terms. We can make Romney's lies work for us instead by diverting their energies at the same level at which they are actually circulating -- sloganistically, rhythmically, viscerally.

This will not only make Romney exposed and defensive, but will surely attract endless superficial punditocratic horse-race and gossip-coverage about Romney's perceived untrustworthiness, his unlikeability, his lack of conviction. No amount of money can re-write reality in the congenial terms of Romney's two lies, while at once trying to out-echo the Village echo-chamber. THis is especially so, given the reservoir of distrust in the Republican Base for Romney -- and note: their white-racist and Fox-conspiracist distrust of Obama is a comparable reservoir, but it's going to be one or the other that the media consolidates. Once his lies fail on his own terms, we can then hang the catastrophic narrative of Romney's life of callous predation on the very same lies he is now hanging his hopes on.

As I keep saying, I am not particularly worried about Obama's re-election chances, but I do worry enormously about whether Obama can win re-election with coat-tails that retain the Senate and re-gain the House for the Democrats. Given the unprecedented irresponsibility of the GOP (not to mention its madness and authoritarianism) Obama needs a Democratic congress to accomplish much in the service of solving America's many shared urgent problems in time.