Mitt Romney’s desperate attempts to attract Ohio voters in the final weeks of the presidential race cost him a hefty political price, leaving him a tarnished legacy for leading a campaign willing to knowingly stretching the truth.
The myth-debunking website PolitiFact awarded its fourth-ever “Lie of the Year” honor to the failed GOP presidential candidate for his repeated use of blatantly false claims that Chrysler planned to move Jeep production from the U.S. to China–all thanks to President Obama.
“I saw a story today that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep—now owned by the Italians—is thinking of moving all production to China,” Romney first said in late October to a crowd in Ohio.
Reporters quickly did a full-throttle take-down of his claims for misconstruing a report by Bloomberg News that suggested Chrysler was mulling the possibility of taking production to the Chinese market.
And though spokesmen from Chrysler itself came out against the accusation, the Romney campaign doubled down on the claims in a full ad that aired in the already heavily saturated political ad market in Ohio.
“Obama took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy and sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build jeeps in China,” the ad inaccurately states. In response to the ad, GM’s Chairman and CEO, Sergio Marchionne, wrote that he felt “obliged to unambiguously restate” the company’s position in one of many statements the company released to directly refute Romney’s claims. PolitiFact called Romney’s jeep ad “brazenly false,” and added that it, “blew up into a lie heard by voters well beyond Ohio.”
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