Bachmann Fails WaPost’s Fact Check

Jason Attermann — June 28, 2011 – 5:07 pm | Economy | Election 2012 | Energy | Israel | Republicans Comments (0) Add a comment

Michele Bachmann (R-MN), who is increasingly known for her inaccurate statements, received a thorough fact checking by The Washington Post of her remarks over the past week. Her erroneous claims about President Barack Obama’s achievements as President range from the economic recovery to unemployment, energy policy, healthcare reform and foreign policy.

The Fact Checker reported on her foreign policy comment:

[From her presidential announcement speech on June 27] ‘And we can’t afford four more years of a foreign policy with a president who leads from behind and who doesn’t stand up for our friends like Israel, and who too often fails to stand against our enemies.’

Bachmann barely touched on foreign policy in her speech, and she does not really explain her comment on Israel. Bachmann has mischaracterized Obama’s position on Israel in the past. Obama has certainly had tensions with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu over the strategy for peace talks with the Palestinians, but at the same time both countries say security and military ties have never been closer.

The Fact Checker also flunked her in May when she pushed falsehoods about Obama’s Middle East speeches.

On economic stimulus:

[From CBS’ ‘Face the Nation,’ June 26] ‘No, I haven’t misled people at all. I think the question would be asked of President Obama, when you told the American people that, if we borrow $1 trillion from other countries and spend it on a stimulus, that we won’t have unemployment go above 8 percent, and today, as we are sitting here, it’s 9.1 percent and the economy is tanking - that is what’s serious. That’s a very serious statement that the president made.’

 The president never made any statement suggesting that the stimulus legislation - which totaled about $800 billion, not $1 trillion - would prevent unemployment from going up beyond 8 percent. Bachmann is referring to a projection issued Jan. 9, 2009 - before Obama even took the oath of office - by two aides: Christina Romer, the nominee to head the Council of Economic Advisers, and Jared Bernstein, an incoming economic adviser to Vice President-elect Biden.

The 14-page report thus was not an official government assessment, nor even an analysis of an actual plan that had passed Congress. Instead, it was an attempt to assess the impact of a possible $775 billion stimulus package and what difference it would make compared to doing nothing….

In any case, Obama never said that.

On energy policy:

[From CBS’ ‘Face the Nation,’ June 26] ‘It’s ironic and sad that the president released all of the oil from the Strategic Oil Reserve because the president doesn’t have an energy policy.’
This is a huge overstatement. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve has 727 million barrels of oil, and the Obama administration announced last week that the U.S. will release 30 million barrels of oil from the reserve. (Another 30 million barrels will be released by European countries.)

So she’s off by a factor of 25.

On the economy:

[From her presidential announcement speech on June 27] ‘In February 2009, President Obama was very confident that his economic policies would turn the country around within a year. He said, and I quote, ‘A year from now, I think people are going to see that we’re starting to make some progress. If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition.’ Well, Mr. President, your policies haven’t worked. Spending our way out of the recession hasn’t worked. And so Mr. President, we take you at your word.’

This quote is from an interview that President Obama had with NBC News about two weeks after taking office. But Bachmann leaves out a few crucial words that undercut her claim that he was ‘very confident’ that his policies would turn around the country ‘within a year.’

Here’s is Obama’s full statement, with the missing words in bold: ‘A year from now, I think people are going to see that we’re starting to make some progress, but there is still going to be some pain out there. If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition.’

Click here to read more erroneous claims by Michele Bachmann.

Click here to read NJDC’s statement on Bachmann.

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