Anita Dunn Quotes

Ryan told the national audience that President Obama had come to a factory in his district that as rumored to be closed. Obama had told the workers that the Federal government could assist and keep the factory open for many years. Then as Ryan explained, the factory closed the following year. He gave this as an example of Obama not keeping his word. However what Ryan did not say was that Obama had made the speech at the factory when he was a candidate for the Presidency, and then the factory was closed while George W. Bush was President and by the time he took office, the closure was done and the factory machines gone. And when Obama took office, our national economy was within days of complete bank and finance collapse. Obama saved most of the banks and then the American automobile industry. To suggest that Obama could have or should have done something for the factory that closed was shockingly misleading. It would have been a minor issue if some party hack had lied and made the same accusation. But this was the Vice Presidential Candidate whose acceptance speech was assumedly vetted by the Presidential Candidate’s staff. That is why the quotation was so memorable.

Romney and his surrogates had more than usual difficulty with getting their facts right. Fact checking organizations would call them on this and in April of 2012, Romney ran a TV ad that was grossly wrong and misleading. When asked about the expose of the falsehood of the ad, Newhouse made this classic response. The reason this is an important quotation is that the statement drew much more critical attention than the false had or its classification as untrue did. Even President Obama made fun of it in his campaign speeches. See Martin Amis {631017} for a serious critique of the meaning of the quotation.

See British Prime Minister James Callaghan for an earlier view with less sophisticated communications technology--{635837}.

One classic example was the fact that in 2012 about one third of Republicans believed that President Obama was a Muslim when he was a devout Christian. The infamous lie had 3 grains of truth: Obama’s father was a Muslim. his middle name was an Islamic name. and he had lived and gone to school as a young boy in Indonesia, the largest Islamic country.

The Presidential Campaigns of 2008 and 2012 shocked many Americans for the blatant lies that opponents of President Obama wrote and broadcast and then some of the retaliatory lies that Obama defenders responded with. However, this quotation from a 19th century political historian shows us that blatant lying in American politics is not at all new.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910

In 1956 Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The chairman was unhappy with his testimony:

1st Baron Verulam

Sinclair was running for the governorship of California and initial polls showed that he was way ahead. Major Conservatives from the country over contributed money to defeat him—more money at the time than had ever been raised even for a Presidential campaign. The Conservatives hired the first political consultants who would advise on an American Campaign throughs a corporation they established Campaigns Inc. The consultants began creating posters and pamphlets many of which were total fabrications attacking Sinclair and then went through his novels that he had written and took quotes from character dialogues in his novels including some of the villain characters who said vile things. They attributed all these terrible quotation to Sinclair, put them into printed pamphlets and distributed them all over the state. Sinclair lost making the assumption that few people would believe the lies that were being issued from Campaign Inc. After that race, political consultants began to work in many campaigns, and with that came more negative campaigning, attacks and more falsehood and lies entered the American political scene.