Setting the tone for the rest of his 2012 presidential run, Mitt Romney’s first television ad of the season misrepresents a John McCain campaign adviser’s quote as the views of President Obama. The blatantly dishonest move solidifies the former governor’s unflappable commitment to deceitful tactics when it comes to any political record—whether it’s his own or his opponent’s.
The new ad features audio from a 2008 speech by then-Senator Obama that included the words “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” What Romney’s ad fails to clarify: the President wasn’t expressing a sentiment of his own. Rather, he was quoting one of McCain’s advisers—a fact that would have been evident had the Romney campaign elected to include the President’s full sentence: “Senator McCain’s campaign actually said, and I quote, ‘if we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.’”
Here are just a few past examples of Romney’s casual relationship with the facts:
In a recent GOP debate, Mitt Romney “certainly left the impression” that he would extend President Obama’s payroll tax cuts—a misleading suggestion given his claim that cutting taxes for middle-class Americans amounted to “temporary little Band-Aids.”
Romney attacked President Obama at a Republican debate in Las Vegas, saying “He doesn’t have a jobs plan even now.” His statement came more than a month after the President introduced the American Jobs Act.
In an allegation PolitiFact.com called a “pants on fire lie,” Romney said President Obama “went around the world and apologized for America.”
Romney pulled a quote from a speech by President Obama out of context to claim that the President “doesn’t understand America.”
An economic whopper: Romney repeatedly said “the recession is deeper because of President Obama”—a fib TIME found to have “no credible basis, at least not beyond the world of partisan economists and commentators.”