Stephanie Cutter, President Barack Obama’s deputy campaign manager, joined MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell on Thursday to discuss Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan speech at the Republican National Convention.
Mitchell asked Cutter about fact checkers reaction to Ryan’s speech which has focused primarily on his claims that a Janesville, Wisconsin, General Motors facility went out of business in 2009 never to reopen as Obama had promised it would while on the campaign trail. Some fact checkers have said that this assertion is partially incorrect, and some functions of that plant shut down in 2008 – prior to when Obama assumed office.
“There’s no delicate way to put this, but he lied,” said Cutter. “He blatantly lied – and brazenly.”
“They point out that he didn’t use the words ‘shut down’ in his speech,” said Mitchell.
“You know what the intention was,” Cutter replied. “Paul Ryan voted for the auto bailout, then he opposed it.” Cutter said that the bailout is responsible for saving an auto industry which is now “thriving.”
“This plant was shut down under the Bush administration,” Cutter asserted.
Another point of contention that fact checkers have made with Ryan’s speech is his insistence that Obama ignored the proposals of the Simpson-Bowles debt commission when Ryan himself also opposed several of that commissions proposals.
“Paul Ryan sat on that commission – he didn’t even show up on the day of the last vote,” said Cutter. “He phoned it in and voted no.”
Cutter says that Ryan’s own deficit reduction plan is based on “phony numbers.” Cutter said that Ryan offered “not one tangible idea” for how to move the country forward.
(Source: MSNBC and Mediaite.com)
