Beyond the Big Lie by Bill Adair

Author:Bill Adair
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2024-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10 The Jeep Lie

On a mild evening in October 2012, Mitt Romney bounded onto a stage to the upbeat chords of Kid Rock’s “Born Free.” He was in Defiance, Ohio, a town with a long history in auto manufacturing and a nicely metaphorical name for telling a whopper. He gave man-hugs to Gov. John Kasich and Sen. Rob Portman, fellow Republicans who had been warming up the crowd, and then launched into a twenty-two-minute speech. He accused President Obama of lying—and told a lie of his own. “I saw a story today,” he said, “that one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep—now owned by the Italians—is thinking of moving all production to China.”

That sentence, which Chrysler, Jeep’s corporate owner, had declared hours earlier was untrue, was a calculated move by Romney to win a crucial state in the final days of a tight race. And his campaign kept it up: For days, they repeated the lie in TV ads despite statements from Chrysler, despite quadruple Pinocchios and Pants on Fire Truth-O-Meters and countless other debunks by fact-checking journalists—not to mention a barrage of attacks from the Obama campaign and even an internal “conscientious objector,” a senior Romney aide who pleaded with the campaign’s top strategist to stop the ad.

The story of the Jeep ad is a case study in how political operatives make a calculated decision to lie and try to justify it. It also reveals the inner workings of a presidential campaign that was staffed by talented people but at times could be dysfunctional. It begins, like so many political lies, with a grain of truth.

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