Running on a Lie

About a week ago, articles and charts started appearing which purported to show that spending under president Obama had not climbed as fast as it had under other presidents. That's right, the charts indicated that while Obama increased spending like all the other modern presidents, he did so at a slower rate. The idea is so shocking that I spent some time trying to find the data underlying the charts, but it was not available. All that was out there was the chart and analysis of it. In the last two days, however, the basis of the analysis has been made public, and it shows that the charts are just lies. Let me explain: In doing the spending analysis, the creator of the chart put all spending in fiscal year 2009 under the Bush column. Remember the 800 billion dollar stimulus that was passed a month and a half after Obama took office? According to the chart, that was spending by George W. Bush. Remember the $400 billion of TARP funds that were left when Obama took office and which Bush said he was not going to spend? According to the chart, when Obama decided to spend those funds anyway, that was Bush spending. In other words, the huge $1.4 trillion increase in spending during Obama's first year in office was Bush's spending according to the chart. Simply put, the chart and the analysis is based on a big lie.

It is not surprising to see campaign supporters lie during a campaign. It happens every four years. Some are just uninformed and some are intentionally lying. Sadly, it is part of the American political scene. What is unusual, however, is for a presidential candidate to just out and out lie. A lie discovered can do more harm to a candidacy than nearly anything else. For a candidate to do so is either a mark of desperation about a losing effort or a show of enormous conceit, a belief that the candidate is so much smarter than the public that he can convince the people of a falsehood and get away with it. That is why it is so astounding that president Obama has now adopted the lie.

Here is what Obama told the crowd at a rally yesterday in Iowa.

“But what my opponent [Mitt Romney] didn’t tell you is that federal spending since I took office has risen at the slowest pace of any president in almost 60 years.”

There you have it. Obama is now putting forth a blatant lie as part of his stump speech. Indeed, he is doing this six months before the election. There is no way that this lie will go undiscovered or unpublicized. Particularly since spending is one of the main issues of the campaign, this subject will be repeated over and over.

I believe that Obama has sealed his own doom as a candidate with these claims. The American people well know that spending has soared for the last four years just like they know the sky is blue. Maybe next week Obama will officially tell us that the sky is now yellow. He will have about as much success convincing folks that the sky has changed color as that he is not a big spender.