The other “fact” I heard about endlessly on MSNBC Wednesday was the timing of the closure of a Janesville auto plant, which Obama had pledged on the campaign trail to keep open, but which began to close before he was elected. Michael Cooper’s summary of this is appropriately nuanced; Ryan was being tendentious, but again, it’s hard to see the outrageous lie in this complicated story. And indeed, an aggressive fact checker might also raise an eyebrow at Obama’s original comment that appropriate government help could keep the plant open another century.
Other Ryan comments are self-serving in a way that I have never heard a politician avoid: He criticizes Obama for rejecting the debt commission without mention his own (not exactly secret) role in its failure and he talks about deficits without (always) apologizing for his Bush-era votes. Is this required? Obama did not, during 2008, highlight his votes to approve spending for the Iraq war, for instance.
The convention’s fixation on Obama’s “you didn’t build that” line, meanwhile, may have caricatured the president, a bit — but far less than Obama has flatly claimed. Obama invoked the phrase in his own battle with an Ayn Randian straw man — “people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart”— and he was making the case for a robust and respected government role in the private sector, a core of the electoral argument. To say he was taken out of context was to say his words were meant to be trivial and meaningless — that he was merely saying that his audience had not in fact constructed the road outside with their hands, an absurd interpretation.
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