President Obama’s deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter blasted Mitt Romney in a Web video on Thursday, accusing the presumptive GOP nominee of “constant distortions” when talking about the president’s record and not telling “the truth” about his own.
“Mitt Romney must think you’re not paying attention to the facts in this election,” Cutter said. “Because there’s no other way to explain his constant distortions about the president and his record.”
Text from the video shows a line from the Romney campaign’s website that says federal spending has accelerated “without precedent in recent history” under President Obama.
“This is wrong, totally wrong,” Cutter says.
Cutter said spending under Obama has grown at the slowest rate since the 1950s, citing the $2 trillion in spending cuts from the Budget Control Act, and said the administration has recovered billions by flagging waste, fraud and abuse in government spending.
The campaigns have been going back and forth on this issue for almost three weeks.
In May, Obama argued that it was Republican spending that led to the massive deficit he inherited and that Romney was giving voters a “cow pie of distortion” by putting it all on the president.
And White House press secretary Jay Carney ripped GOP criticism about spending under the Obama administration, calling it “BS.” Carney said reporting on the GOP criticism without exploring the counterargument is “a sign of sloth and laziness” by reporters.
“Do not buy into the BS that you hear,” Carney said to reporters aboard Air Force One in late May.
Carney, a former reporter, read a passage from an article by Rex Nutting at MarketWatch called “The Obama spending binge never happened,” which Cutter also cited in the Web video.
The article says that spending under the Obama administration has grown more slowly than at any point since the 1950s, and that claims to the contrary are due to a misunderstanding of how to read federal budget data.
“Although there was a big stimulus bill under Obama, federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s,” Nutting says in the article.
Republicans break down the administration’s spending as a percentage of gross domestic product, which would make the last four years the most profligate since World War II.
“Mitt Romney not only likes to distort our record, but he doesn’t like to tell the truth about his own,” Cutter continued.
Cutter says Romney’s economic plan would swell the deficit by $5 trillion because of tax cuts for the wealthiest citizens and that he left Massachusetts with a $1 billion deficit.
Independent fact checkers say the $1 billion number is not accurate but rather the high-end of an estimate that never materialized. While Romney’s economic plan would cut taxes by up to $5 trillion, his budget plan hasn’t been analyzed to estimate how that might affect the deficit.
