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.
As John Cole remarks,
Virtually everything he said was a lie, so I am not sure how you choose one over the other.
Amen to that. By the way, with Republicans now wanting steep cuts to Medicare on top of means testing it on top of voucherizing it, how's that 2011 Politifact Lie of the Year holding up, boys?
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