Mitt Romney may have lost the presidential election but he does hold the title for running the most dishonest campaign in modern history. To add to his accomplishments in this area, PolitiFact has awarded him their Lie of the Year:
It was a lie told in the critical state of Ohio in the final days of a close campaign — that Jeep was moving its U.S. production to China. It originated with a conservative blogger, who twisted an accurate news story into a falsehood. Then it picked up steam when the Drudge Report ran with it. Even though Jeep’s parent company gave a quick and clear denial, Mitt Romney repeated it and his campaign turned it into a TV ad.
And they stood by the claim, even as the media and the public expressed collective outrage against something so obviously false.
People often say that politicians don’t pay a price for deception, but this time was different: A flood of negative press coverage rained down on the Romney campaign, and he failed to turn the tide in Ohio, the most important state in the presidential election.
PolitiFact has selected Romney’s claim that Barack Obama “sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China” at the cost of American jobs as the 2012 Lie of the Year.
Romney lied so frequently that it is hard to choose just one lie. This was a good choice as it was a blatant lie which Romney repeated despite considerable media coverage of the fact that he was lying. It is a perfect example for an outfit such as PolitFact to use in that it highlights the role of fact checkers in exposing a lie which wound up hurting the lying candidate. However if I were to choose the Lie of the Year I would choose one which the Factcheckers exposed with far less success–the distortion of Obama’s didn’t build it statement. While Obama was speaking of government infrastructure which businesses benefit from, the Romney campaign twisted this to claim that Obama was saying that businessmen did not build their own business. I would give this lie the award because of the audacity of the lie and the frequency with which Republicans repeated it. This including making this lie the theme of the Republican convention in 2012.