Obama starts the Re-elect Lies

The Obama campaign released an ad today which touts both the ethics of Obama and the success of the clean energy program in creating jobs. The ad is a tissue of lies. Let's start with the "ethics" discussion. The Obamacrats tout Politifact stating that Obama kept his campaign promise to toughen ethics rules. This one is a real laugher. Politifact said this on January 21, 2009. Obama had been in office for one day at that point. He changed a few of the ethics rules when he came into office and this was an acknowledgement of those changes. It was not, as the ad suggests, some sort of endorsement of Obama's conduct with regard to Solyndra and the many other energy "investments" that shoveled taxpayer money to enterprises owned by big Obama contributors. Obama also cites the League of Women Voters calling his ethics record "unprecedented". That statement, however, was also made in April of 2009, after Obama was in office for just over two months. There are no encomiums to Obama's ethics from the last three years, since by that time the ethics of his administration (or more precisely, the lack of ethics) was on display for all to see. So, Obama's claims are intentionally misleading, to say the least.

Next come the claims about clean energy. Here the ad claims that there are 2.7 million people working in America's clean energy industry. That is not the same thing as saying that Obama had anything to do with those jobs. Indeed, according to a report by the Pew Charitable Trust, there were well over a million people employed in clean energy jobs when Obama took office and the figure was growing very rapidly. So about half of these jobs already existed before Obama even began to push investments into clean energy, but Obama still takes credit for them. The real question is whether any of these 1.3 million new jobs were the result of anything that Obama did. Certainly, the half billion dollars given to Solyndra did not create any jobs; that money was lost and the company went bankrupt. Indeed, perhaps the most important contribution that Obama made to the clean energy industry was pursuing a policy that resulted in the price of oil increasing by about 150% since his term began. Obama has pushed gasoline prices through the roof and made electricity rates skyrocket. In this way, some of the alternative energy sources became viable alternatives. Of course, in the process of raising energy costs, Obama managed to kill millions of American jobs in other industries that could no longer compete with foreign firms that had lower energy expenses. In short, Obama had nothing to do with essentially all of the jobs for which he is now claiming credit. To make matters worse, Obama's policies force millions of other Americans out of work, hardly a record to be proud of.