NEW YORK — Mitt Romney on Thursday took umbrage at what he called inaccurate and misleading ads run by the Obama campaign and an allied super PAC, even as his own campaign continues to run an attack ad that has deemed “pants on fire” false by a fact-check organization.
Asked by conservative radio host Bill Bennett about the “lowball nature” of an ad being run by the pro-Obama Priorities USA Action super PAC, which tries to tie the presumptive nominee to a woman’s cancer death, Romney said fact-checking groups have called the ad misleading.
“The various fact-checkers look at some of these charges that are in the Obama ads, and they say that they’re wrong and inaccurate, and yet he keeps on just running them,” Romney said in the radio interview. “You know, in the past, when people pointed out that something was inaccurate, why, campaigns either pulled the ad [or] they were embarrassed. Today they just blast ahead.”
But the issue cuts both ways, as Romney well knows. His own campaign’s most recent ad claims that under the Obama administration’s recent changes to welfare reform, people wouldn’t have to work or train for a job. “They just send you your welfare check,” a voiceover proclaims. This claim has also been debunked by multiple fact-check groups, which point out that the changes to the welfare law are meant to offer states greater flexibility, but require that states increase the amount of people moving from welfare to work.
Despite his own rhetoric decrying false and misleading advertisements, Romney’s campaign has shown no sign that it will remove its own factually challenged ads or stop making similar charges on the stump. Instead, Romney continues to make the argument that Obama is pushing a “policy of removing work from welfare,” which he says will move the country toward “a culture of dependency.”
To bolster his point, Romney gave an example of a question he was asked while shaking hands on the rope line after a campaign event in Iowa on Wednesday.
“[A woman] said, ‘But you know, how about the people who have children at home and, you know, don’t want to work?’ And it’s like, well, we have to work,” Romney told Bennett in his radio interview. “The idea we’re going to have a citizenry that raises families but doesn’t work, and the concept of government to pay for the nurturing of their children and for the support of the adult, that is just not something that can build the kind of society which is uplifting to the individual and strengthening to the nation.”
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