December 12, 2012

Poll Finds Americans Blame Boner… um… Boehner, For Fiscal Cliff Fiasco

President Obama is crushing John Boehner in the fiscal cliff battle—at least in the polls.

An ABC/Washington Post survey out this morning finds 49 percent of those questioned approving of Obama’s handling of the budget negotiations, compared with 42 percent who disapprove.

Now look at the House speaker’s numbers: Some 49 percent disapprove of his performance, with only 25 percent giving a thumbs up.

So Obama is winning the public relations battle over the effort to avert automatic tax hikes and spending cuts by a whopping 2-1 margin.

Even among Republicans, according to the poll, Boehner barely breaks even: 39 percent approval, 37 percent disapproval.

Separately, a Bloomberg poll says Americans believe by a 2-to-1 majority that the election results were an endorsement of Obama’s promise to protest Medicare and Social Security benefits–and nearly half the Republicans surveyed say he has a mandate to raise taxes on the wealthy.

h/t The Daily Beast

PolitiFact Chose Mitt Romney As Liar Of The Year

His entire campaign could have won this dubious honor, but it was the lie he told in the final stages of his campaign that put Romney over the top and earned him PolitiFact’s liar of the year award.

It was a lie told in the critical state of Ohio in the final days of a close campaign — that Jeep was moving its U.S. production to China. It originated with a conservative blogger, who twisted an accurate news story into a falsehood. Then it picked up steam when the Drudge Report ran with it. Even though Jeep’s parent company gave a quick and clear denial, Mitt Romney repeated it and his campaign turned it into a TV ad.

And they stood by the claim, even as the media and the public expressed collective outrage against something so obviously false.

People often say that politicians don’t pay a price for deception, but this time was different: A flood of negative press coverage rained down on the Romney campaign, and he failed to turn the tide in Ohio, the most important state in the presidential election.

PolitiFact has selected Romney’s claim that Barack Obama “sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China” at the cost of American jobs as the 2012 Lie of the Year.