David Corn

Washington Bureau Chief

Corn has broken stories on presidents, politicians, and other Washington players. He's written for numerous publications and is a talk show regular. His best-selling books include Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War.

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How to Beat the Fact-Checkers

Politicians have figured it out: When caught in a lie, attack the truth cops.

—By David Corn

| September/October 2012 Issue

Illustration by Greg Clarke

Editors' note: With Paul Ryan letting loose a string of whoppers at the GOP convention, Newsweek admitting it doesn't verify the accuracy of facts cited by its writers, and a top Romney aide defiantly proclaiming, "We're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers," political fact-checking has been a hot topic this campaign season. For our September/October issue, David Corn took an in-depth look at how the verification industry plays into the political lying game—and whether it makes any difference.

As Mitt Romney was buttoning up the Republican nomination this past spring, he addressed the annual convention of the American Society of News Editors in the cavernous ballroom of the Marriott Wardman Park hotel in Washington, DC. He blasted President Obama for breaking a "promise" to keep unemployment below 8 percent—a charge that had previously earned Romney three Pinocchios from the Washington Post's "Fact Checker" column. He also slammed the president for "apologizing for America abroad"—an accusation that PolitiFact had months earlier branded a "pants on fire" lie. And he accused Obama of adding "nearly as much public debt as all the prior presidents combined" (a statement already judged "an exaggeration" by FactCheck.org) and of cutting $500 million from Medicare (a "false" assertion according to PolitiFact).

A politician mangling the truth is hardly news. Yet what was notable about this moment was that the candidate felt no compunction about appearing before more than 1,500 journalists and repeating whoppers that their own colleagues had so roundly debunked. Nor was Romney challenged about any of these untruths when it came time to ask questions. He was able to peddle a string of officially determined falsehoods before a crowd of newspaper editors—repeat: a crowd of newspaper editors—and face absolutely no consequences. The uncomfortable question for the press: With the news cycle overwhelmed by the headline-of-the-nanosecond, and with politicians ignoring or openly challenging the truth cops, how much does the much-heralded political fact-checking industry really matter?

Big Media's push for independent and ongoing verification of newsmakers' statements stretches back to the mid-2000s, when many news organizations were on the defensive over their failure to vet the Bush administration's claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania launched FactCheck.org, with veteran CNN reporter Brooks Jackson at the helm, in 2003. PolitiFact, created by the St. Petersburg Times, and the Washington Post's Fact Checker followed four years later.

[Read the full article]

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Romney's Afghanistan Screw-Up and My Tweet

—By David Corn

| Mon Sep. 10, 2012 1:30 PM PDT

Fang Zhe/Xinhua/ZUMAPress

Mitt Romney is still entangled in the mess he created when he failed to reference (let alone thank) the tens of thousands of US soldiers serving in Afghanistan during his speech at the recent Republican convention. His big night in Tampa was mostly overshadowed by Clint Eastwood's improv act, but his Afghanistan oops also contributed to the bad post-convention bounce for the Romney campaign, with Romney trying to explain the oversight in the days afterward. It's been particularly intriguing for me to watch this story unfold, given that, as far as I can tell, I was one of the first, if not the first, journalists to note that Romney had inexplicably short-changed the troops in Afghanistan.

[Read more in the MoJo blog]

Obama's Big Speech: It’s a Fight About Values

The president spoke little about himself or his accomplishments—or Romney. Instead, he described the election as a choice of very different paths.

—By David Corn

| Thu Sep. 6, 2012 10:05 PM PDT

President Barack Obama speaks to the delegation at the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina. Harry E. Walker/Mct/Zuma

In the weeks after the November 2010 elections—which Barack Obama accurately called a "shellacking" for him and his party—the president thought long and hard about how to contend with the tea-partyized GOP that was on the march. He and his fellow Democrats had failed to keep their opponents at bay by arguing that John Boehner and the Republicans would drive the slowly recovering economy back into the ditch. He needed another line of argument. Within weeks, he had one: a war of values.

See our full coverage of the 2012 Democratic National Convention.

That was at the heart of his serious-minded and not quite soaring acceptance speech at the Democratic convention on Thursday night. He described the election as a pivotal choice:

On every issue, the choice you face won't be just between two candidates or two parties. It will be a choice between two different paths for America. A choice between two fundamentally different visions for the future. Ours is a fight to restore the values that built the largest middle class and the strongest economy the world has ever known; the values my grandfather defended as a soldier in Patton's Army; the values that drove my grandmother to work on a bomber assembly line while he was gone.

This is a case Obama has been building for almost two years. By early December 2010, he was telling his aides that he believed that the Republicans would pursue such an extreme political course that he would have the opportunity to shift the 2012 campaign from a referendum on his stewardship of the struggling economy to a competition between clashing sets of values. He would contrast the divide between his call for communal action (via government) to create jobs, to bolster infrastructure, education, and innovation, to preserve the social safety net, and to reduce the deficit through shared sacrifices (including raising taxes on the well-to-do) with the Republicans' supposedly freedom-first crusade to crush government and protect high-income taxpayers.

Throughout his subsequent squabbles over budget cuts and the debt ceiling with the House Republicans—including Rep. Paul Ryan, the budget committee chair who was pushing a plan that would end the Medicare guarantee and impose draconian cuts in government services—Obama sought to tether the fight of the moment to this confrontation regarding values. In April 2011, he delivered a speech on debt reduction—he described it to aides as "values-based"—that blasted Ryan's plan, noting that it "would lead to a fundamentally different America than the one we've known." Ryan's proposed budget, he said, offered "a vision that says if our roads crumble and our bridges collapse, we can't afford to fix them. If there are bright young Americans who have the drive and the will but not the money to go to college, we can't afford to send them." Ryan's plan, he insisted, was "deeply pessimistic."

[Read the full article]

A Tale of Two Conventions

The nation is deeply divided, but the gatherings in Charlotte and Tampa show how starkly dissimilar the Democratic and Republican visions of the American experience are.

—By David Corn

| Thu Sep. 6, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

Romney pins: Edmund D. Fountain/Tampa Bay Times/Zuma; Obama pins: Sean Meyers/Zuma

Not too far from the Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte, a local art gallery is featuring an exhibit called "Divided State of America," but it's not necessary to trek to this space to contemplate the deep divisions within the nation. You need only spend a few nanoseconds at the Democratic presidential convention, after experiencing a week at the Republican gathering in Tampa, to realize you have left one reality for a much different one. And this goes far beyond policy positions and political stances.

See our full coverage of the 2012 Democratic National Convention.

Here's a brief guide:

The people. It's rather obvious: Planet Democrat is inhabited by people of different colors; Planet Republican is monochromatic. This stark contrast has long existed and is not a surprise. (One recent poll showed Mitt Romney with zero—yes, zero—support among African Americans.) Yet shifting from Tampa to Charlotte is not unlike the moment in The Wizard of Oz when black-and-white gives way to the full spectrum. In Tampa, it seemed there were more black and Latino Americans on the stage than among the audience of thousands of white people. The streets of downtown Charlotte—which, for some reason, is called "uptown"—are overflowing with diversity.

And this extends beyond race. The thousands of delegates in Charlotte represent more income (or class) diversity. Sure, plenty of well-heeled Democratic donors, lobbyists, and supporters are strolling about, but there are many folks who look as if they are heading back to tough jobs when the convention is done: teachers, nurses, Teamsters, and the like. In Tampa, I conducted an experiment and asked several journalists to fill in this blank: "These Republican delegates look like they come from ________." The most common answer: "a country club." Another reply: "a gated community."

The street. Tampa was an antiseptic affair. The arena was in a security area that resembled a Green Zone. Delegates were bused in, then bused out. With scant interaction between the convention and the rest of the world, no sense of community was created. It was as if the GOP delegates were suburbanites—or exurbanites—commuting to and from their place of business, zipping past the locals and their neighborhoods. In Charlotte, the delegates and others have flooded the downtown area, walking from one event to another, interacting with one another, the residents of the city who have flocked to the city's center, and even the street-corner anti-abortion protesters. There's a vibrancy that embodies the best values of community and urban life.

[Read the full article]

Will Obama Take Advantage of Romney's Big Convention Mistake?

The president's advisers say Mitt Romney's substance-free speech in Tampa gave Obama an opportunity to exploit in Charlotte.

—By David Corn

| Wed Sep. 5, 2012 3:00 AM PDT

In Tampa, Mitt Romney delivered a 4,000-word acceptance speech and devoted only a sliver of the address to what he would do as president, briefly describing the most generic policy aims: achieve energy independence, promote school choice, improve trade policies, cut the deficit, cut taxes, and kill Obamacare. In a speech mainly designed to re-reintroduce him as a solid business-minded fellow who could be trusted to do fine as an anyone-but-Obama president, Romney provided no details on how he'd do any of this. And senior Democratic and Obama campaign officials believe that Romney's vagueness has afforded President Barack Obama a significant opening to exploit at the Democratic convention in Charlotte.

See our full coverage of the 2012 Democratic National Convention.

"We've been talking about this all week," Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt said on Tuesday, hours before the convention opened. "For months, the Romney campaign said his speech would be when they would introduce Romney and his plans, but there were no specifics…They didn't fill in the holes."

A Democratic strategist advising the campaign, who is not authorized to speak publicly for it, noted, "As soon as Romney was done, we saw the chance to do something Romney failed to do: to spell out what Obama would do if elected."

The Obama crew's response to Romney's surface-skimming speech was not a partisan reflex. Days afterward, Bill Kristol, the neoconservative commentator who loves to be cranky about Romney, slapped the Republican presidential nominee for not describing what he'd do in the Oval Office:

I thought that they should do a more forward-looking emphasis on the next four years. They thought they're comfortable with asking voters to pass judgment on the last four years and…just reassuring people about Mitt Romney.

You talk to the top Romney strategists, they use that word an awful lot. We have to reassure voters about Mitt Romney. He doesn't hate women, he's a likable guy. He's a generous guy. The Republican Party is diverse. That's enough, plus the case against Obama. That's their theory of the race and they had a convention that fit with their theory of the race. If you believe and I'm more inclined to this other belief, that you need to actually convince voters by making a positive case for the Romney-Ryan ticket, there was much less of that.

With his speech, Romney certainly didn't use policy details to attract voters. And voters, for this or other reasons, did not react strongly. Gallup found that only 38 percent judged Romney's speech excellent or good. This was the lowest mark in years for a presidential acceptance speech (John McCain in 2008, 47 percent; Obama in 2008, 58 percent; George W. Bush in 2004, 49 percent; John Kerry in 2004, 52 percent; Al Gore in 2000, 51 percent; Bush in 2000, 51 percent; Bob Dole in 1996, 52 percent). Going light on the policy substance didn't seem to help Romney, who appears to have earned no significant boost from his convention.

[Read the full article]