Do you vote for presidents who repeatedly lie to you? I don’t.
President Obama lied in his 2010 State of the Union Address when he said his administration had “excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs” (in fact, he had 40 ex-lobbyists then, and 54 now, according to the Washington Examiner’s Timothy P. Carney). He lied that year when he said “We are on the path to cutting our deficits in half,” and he’s lying this year when he says his new plan would cut the deficit by $4.3 trillion (more like $2 trillion). Obama lied when he said his signature health-care plan represented a triumph of the little man over special interests (it was precisely the opposite). He lied when he said the Congressional Budget Office concluded that ObamaCare would reduce the deficit by $1 trillion (it’s complicated, but no), and he, uh, forecasted incorrectly when he insisted that the typical family’s insurance premiums would go down $2,500 a year (they have instead gone up).
The administration’s reaction to the deadly Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi — lie, lie, lie and lie.
We live in a time that screams out for policy truth-telling. The nation’s finances are heading for a “fiscal cliff” of massive tax increases, old-age entitlements are permanently in the red, the federal government has doubled in cost since Bill Clinton retired. We don’t know how Mitt Romney will handle these hard truths, but we have four years’ evidence for Obama’s approach. He will lie. And for that, he will never get my vote.
— Matt Welch is the editor in chief of Reason magazine.