Tonight GOP Presidential Candidates Participating In The 2011 N.H. Debate Repeated The Same, Tired Anti-Obama Rhetoric As Usual.
They Slammed His Policies While Offering NO Solutions!
NO Logical Solutions That Is.
I Think Pres. Obama Should Begin Some Kind Of Damage Control Versus Choosing To Totally Ignore What's Being Said About His Policies & Record.
Don't Respond To Everything! Just The Most EXTREME Rhetoric.
Fact Checking the Republican Debate
As they debated the economic downturn and health care, the Republican candidates who faced off Monday night in New Hampshire sometimes let spin run ahead of the facts.
Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, said that while President Obama didn’t start the recession, “he made it worse, and longer.” Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House of Representatives, called the Obama administration “anti-jobs.”
While it is true that unemployment is far worse today than Mr. Obama’s advisers initially predicted, it would be even worse without the stimulus bill that many Republican candidates derided, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
The president’s advisers said in 2009 that the stimulus bill would keep the unemployment rate below 8 percent. Last month it was at 9.1 percent — even worse than the president’s advisers had warned it would be if Congress had failed to pass the stimulus.
But things would have been worse without the stimulus, according to a report issued last month by the Congressional Budget Office. The stimulus increased the number of people working by between 1.2 million and 3.3 million during the first three months of the year, the report found. It added that the stimulus, which passed with almost no Republican support, lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.6 and 1.8 percentage points.
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Health care also drew misleading or incomplete answers, as the candidates sought to capitalize on the unpopularity of President Obama’s health care plan among Republicans.
Mr. Romney flatly declared that he would “repeal Obamacare,’’ although the president’s health care law has strong similarities to the law that Mr. Romney pushed through when he was governor. The Massachusetts law, like the federal law, has a mandate requiring most residents to purchase coverage or pay a tax penalty — the provision that has drawn the most anger from conservatives.
Asked about the similarities, Mr. Romney said at the debate that Massachusetts, unlike Washington, did not finance its plan with a tax increase. But since Mr. Romney left office in 2007, the state has had to raise taxes to keep the program afloat.
Tim Pawlenty, the former Minnesota governor, somewhat reluctantly, repeated his charge that the president’s program was in effect “Obamneycare,’’ since it was modeled on the Massachusetts law.
But in making the attack, Mr. Pawlenty obscured his own changing position on mandates. In a 2006 speech on health care, he called mandates “potentially helpful” and “a worthy goal,” though he stressed that by themselves they would not solve the problem of getting more people insured.
He is not the only candidate with an evolving position. As recently as last month Mr. Gingrich said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he had favored “a variation” on the mandate. The next day he issued a statement saying: “I oppose the Obamacare mandate. Period.”
At one point, Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, who announced her entry into the race at the debate, seemed to be debating herself when she was asked if she would seek to overturn the law in states that have legalized gay marriage.
“I don’t see that it’s the role of a president to go into states and interfere with their state laws,’’ said Ms. Bachmann, a favorite of Tea Party members who believe in states’ rights.
But then, after some other candidates said that they supported a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman, she amended her answer.
“John, I do support a constitutional amendment on marriage between a man and a woman,’’ she told the moderator, John King of CNN, “but I would not be going into the states to overturn their state law.”
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Sources: CNN, MSNBC, NY Times, Youtube, Google Maps
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