Cape Politics

Romney lies to AP

Mitt Romney and the truth

By Dan Kennedy

Reporters don't like to call politicians liars, even when they lie. We tend to use euphemisms — "at odds with the facts" being a favorite. But Mitt Romney is a liar — a flagrant repeat offender. Everyone knows it, and the press doesn't quite know what to do about it.

Yesterday, Associated Press reporter Glen Johnson couldn't take it anymore, interrupting Romney when he said, "I don't have lobbyists running my campaign. I don't have lobbyists that are tied to my —"

"That's not true," Johnson interjected. "Ron Kaufman's a lobbyist." Kaufman, a longtime Massachusetts politico and a lobbyist, has been heavily involved in Romney's campaign.

If you watch the video, you'll see that Romney tries to hang his argument on a technicality, saying that Kaufman isn't "running" his campaign. But it is simply a matter of objective fact that Kaufman is "tied" to Romney's campaign (as Romney started to say), and at a very high level.

I know Johnson a bit. He's a professional. Perhaps he shouldn't have leaped in quite as aggressively as he did yesterday, but how much of this garbage can he be expected to listen to? And do watch the video all the way to the end. You don't want to miss Romney and his spokesman, Eric Ferhnstrom, trying to intimidate Johnson for doing his job.

Just two prominent other examples of Romney's lies that you probably already know about:

• At a televised debate in New Hampshire, John McCain complained that Romney had described his illegal-immigration proposal as "amnesty" in a television commercial. Romney's response: "I don't describe your plan as amnesty in my ad. I don't call it amnesty." Well, yes he did.
  
• As David Bernstein recently revealed in the Boston Phoenix, Romney's oft-repeated claim that his father, George Romney, had marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is not true. Some Romney defenders, including Jay Severin of WTKK (96.9 FM), continue to insist that Romney only meant it metaphorically. But the Romney campaign knew better, producing two eyewitnesses who claimed — falsely — that they had seen the elder Romney and King walking side by side in Grosse Pointe, Mich., in 1963. And this 1978 quote from the Mittster would seem to be beyond parsing: "My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit."

Of course, the entire reason that Romney has suddenly reassumed his former persona as a skilled business executive is that Republicans found his late embrace of right-wing social issues to be utterly unbelievable, as the Globe's Scot Lehigh notes today.

Even as a liberal media critic, I don't like calling Romney a liar. But Romney is proving to be something of an ethical test for journalists. When a candidate lies repeatedly, as Romney has, should a journalist maintain objectivity and refrain from saying the obvious? Or does he or she have an ethical obligation to point out that the liar is lying again? I'd argue the latter.

Scott Allen Miller, who saved me the trouble of tracking down the video, weighs in usefully.