Lies, damned lies and Paul Ryan’s convention speech

It was a passionate speech, a confident speech, one that drew rapturous applause and brought delegates to their feet. For a Republican party still struggling to drum up any real enthusiasm for their presidential nominee, at least his running-mate, Paul Ryan, certainly knew how to fire up a crowd.

And if activists didn’t know much about Ryan before, they do now. With a well crafted speech, peppered with spiky jabs at President Obama, the Wisconsin congressman managed to wake up a convention that was largely uninspired by the first two days of business. Here, at last, was someone who could speak directly to voters, who could get those grassroots activists excited again.

Except Ryan’s speech hasn’t gone down quite so well with the army of fact checkers and journalists who’ve been looking beyond the rhetoric at what he actually said. Headlines like this, in the New York Times: “Ryan – the Vacuum behind the slogans”, and even this, from Fox News: “Ryan’s speech was an apparent attempt to set the world record for the greatest number of blatant lies and misrepresentations slipped into a single political speech.”

Blatant lies and misrepresentations. Fox News contributor Sally Kohn

So here is a round-up of those disputed Ryan statements, with the evidence that sets the record straight.

Ryan slammed President Obama for making $716 billion in cuts to the future Medicare budget. However Ryan’s own budget plan not only relied on these self same cuts, but would also slash another $205 billion on top. Bloomberg points out that the Obama cuts don’t directly affect people on Medicare, but are in the form of reduced payments to hospitals, insurance plans and other service providers.

Ryan accuses Obama of ignoring the bipartisan debt commission he set up to make recommendations about how to cut the deficit. “They came back with an urgent report. He thanked them, sent them on their way, and then did exactly nothing.”

However the commission’s final report was deemed to be unofficial because too many commission members had dissented. Including one Paul Ryan, who opposed the plan because he said it would raise taxes and wouldn’t cut enough from health spending.

Ryan got plenty of applause for denouncing Obama’s stimulus bill. “That money wasn’t just spent and wasted – it was borrowed, spent and wasted”, he declared. But wait. Didn’t Paul Ryan lobby hard for stimulus money for his own district of Janesville? And as Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker has documented, the big economic successes there have made it with the help of federal cash – some of it from the stimulus.

Seeking closure?

Speaking of Janesville, Ryan also made much play of the now-closed General Motors plant there, implying that Obama had done nothing to keep it open, despite telling workers there “I believe if our goverment is there to support you, this plant will be here for another hundred years.” It didn’t take fact checkers long to find out that the GM plant actually closed BEFORE Obama became President, making it difficult to blame him for that one.

Indeed, Huffington Post has uncovered a news report from 2008 which quotes the Bush White House saying that GM was “adapting well” by taking the decision to close the Janesville plant.

And there’s more.

Even if we were to leave aside the stuff about pinning the credit rating downgrade on Obama (the one which happened after Republicans in the House refused to raise the debt ceiling and pushed the whole crisis to breaking point). Or the bit where Ryan omits to explain that the huge debt he says Obama was responsible for was mainly down to the foreign wars and tax cuts that he supported under President Bush.

Even some of the compassionate bits are, according to The New Republic, factually suspect. Ryan talked about the how society should be judged by the way “it treats those who cannot defend or care for themselves… We can make the safety net safe again.” Jonathan Cohn points out research that shows almost two thirds of the Ryan budget cuts “would come from programs that serve low income people”.

Shoot the messenger

And Ryan couldn’t resist a dig at Obama for failing to communicate his message properly – there’s been more than enough talking, he said, when what’s needed is leadership. That would be the Paul Ryan, then, who told Ryan Lizza that part of the reason President Bush’s attempt to reform social security had failed in 2005, was becase the administration failed to sell it effectively. “You’ve got to prepare the country for these things”, he said.

Factual shortcuts. Breathtakingly dishonest. Myths and hypocrisies. And an editorial in a Wisconsin paper which accuses Ryan of trying to “use his hometown as a prop, and then to try to deceive the country about the causes of its circumstance”, and insisiting local people, or anyone who remembers 2008, won’t believe him.

But perhaps the headlines in what the Republicans like to call the “liberal media” scarcely matter, not among the fired up supporters or the delegates waiting days for a chance to cheer and applaud and find reason to be hopeful about their leaders. And the GOP has defended the speech, like this from Jeb Bush: “To suggest that Paul Ryan is not completely truthful… I think it is wrong.”

So what will linger longest in voters’ minds, after the hoop-la and the balloons and the poltical buttons in Tampa have been packed away, and forgotten? Ryan, the passionate all-round nice guy who you’d be happy to have a beer with, happy to have in charge? Or those journalists painstakingly trawling through the archives, matching rhetoric, with reality check?

Even the best fact checkers can’t make a call on that one. Yet.

Felicity Spector writes about US politics for Channel 4 News