The Republican National Committee is launching a misleading, negative ad that distorts or blatantly ignores President Obama’s record. The ad is entirely based on the false claim that the President has not kept any of the promises he made four years ago.
The ad reveals just how much the RNC needs the American people to ignore the President’s record. In reality, President Obama has delivered on promises he made in 2008:
The President promised to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Now, our dependence level has hit a 16-year-low.
He promised to change the tax code to support the middle class instead of the wealthy and corporations, so he delivered numerous tax cuts for middle-class families and small businesses.
He pledged to make sure community colleges prepare students for jobs in local industries, so he invested $2 billion in community college and workforce training and announced the Community College to Career Fund to make that happen.
He promised to help make college more affordable, so he doubled funding for Pell Grants and is capping student loan payments.
The President said he’d fight for American manufacturing. Under his administration, the U.S. has created over 460,000 manufacturing jobs since the beginning of 2010.
In 2008, he said that the military’s Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy was “counterproductive” and unfair. Two years later, he signed its repeal.
He pledged to deliver health care reform so families can afford quality health care. In 2010, he signed the landmark Affordable Care Act into law.
These are just a few of the promises the President kept—and the RNC is completely ignoring. Of course, the ad merely reflects the increasingly negative tactics that Mitt Romney and the GOP must rely on to malign the President and bolster their image in the public eye. As GOP strategist Nelson Warfield said himself, “It’s clear the negative ads are what’s keeping [Romney] alive,” adding that even Republican voters “will not vote for Mitt Romney unless they are forced into it. And the way they’re forced into it is when he beats the other guy senseless.”
Taking that warning to heart, Romney is using his vast wealth and deep-pocketed allies to unleash “ceaseless barrage of negative advertisements” on any and all candidates that stand in his way of the presidency. The Romney campaign has “deployed every tactic in the negative-campaign playbook,” and the GOP and super PACs are bent on following suit.
Super PACs like Karl Rove’s American Crossroads or Americans for Prosperity have already spent millions on the presidential race and plan to spend hundreds of millions more. Seventy-two percent of their millions has already been spent on negative ads.
So the fact that the GOP is ratcheting up its negative attacks on the President is not surprising, but it is sacrificing the truth to do it.