On the day of the New Hampshire Primary, I spent a good deal of time on the radio with my friend and Townhall colleague Hugh Hewitt, debating issues and candidates both on his show and my own.
Hugh’s a great guy, and one of the best political commentators in the country, but he recycled an old and despicable lie in the course of our conversation. This distortion of the truth is unworthy of such a decent and fair-minded observer and Hugh owes an apology – not to me, but to Senator John McCain.
During the course of our conversation, I deplored the slimy negative ads aired by his candidate, Mitt Romney – in particular a TV commercial where the narrator says that John McCain “voted to allow illegals to collect Social Security.”
I condemned the ad as an outright lie, but Hugh defended it as an arguable, reasonable description of McCain’s position.
Let’s settle the issue, Hugh, and move ahead to that apology—because the record clearly shows that I was right and you were wrong. There’s nothing defensible about Romney’s smear.
FactCheck.org is a non-partisan, non-profit project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. The website spanks Democrats and Republicans alike when they try to lie for political advantage. On December 28th, they offered a devastating review of the despicable Romney ad aimed against McCain, using the headline “More Mitt Malarkey.”
FactCheck.org reported in part:
“Romney’s latest ad attacks McCain in New Hampshire with false and misleading claims.
“It claims McCain ‘voted to allow illegals to collect Social Security.’ That’s untrue. Nobody who is in the country illegally could be paid any Social Security under McCain’s immigration bill ….Nobody proposed to pay benefits to anyone who is in the U.S. illegally…The statement that McCain ‘voted to allow illegals to collect Social Security’ is false.”
That should settle the issue, should it not?
If a nonpartisan, unaffiliated resource like FactCheck.org describes the Romney smear as both “untrue” and “false,” isn’t it a strong indication that I was justified in calling it a lie?
Let me anticipate Hugh’s response (because I know that Mr. Hewitt is a smart and sophisticated guy) to prevent this important issue from getting confused with misleading details.
Hugh might argue that the Romney attack is misleading, but not false, because the immigration bill would have given millions of illegals a path to citizenship, and once they became legal residents and citizens, they would then receive credit toward future benefits for the amounts they had already paid into the system. In that sense, immigrants who legalized their status would get credit for payments they made into the system while they were illegal.
But here is the truth—the simple, undeniable, bracing, refreshing and necessary truth –about the comprehensive immigration reform championed by President Bush, John McCain, John Kyl, Trent Lott, Mitch McConnell and, at one point, most other Republicans in Senate. As FactCheck makes unmistakably clear: “UNDER CURRENT LAW, illegal immigrants who work and pay Social Security taxes may later receive credit toward future benefits for the amount they have paid, if they become legal residents or citizens. THE McCAIN MEASURE WOULDN’T HAVE CHANGED THAT.” (emphasis added)
In other words, the proposal for comprehensive immigration reform would have done nothing to alter the basis under which immigrants who qualified for legal status got credit for the payroll taxes they had already paid. Yes, the Romney ad is a loathsome lie.
And what about an attempt by some Republicans to alter the compromise legislation during the immigration fight by changing the system so that newly legalized immigrants would be disqualified from receiving credit for payroll taxes they had paid while illegal? Eleven Republican Senators voted to kill that proposal, including John McCain. Why? Because stripping tax credit for newly legalized immigrants would help remove the incentive for them to go through the process to earn that legal status—paying the thousands of dollars in fines, going through background checks, paying back taxes, mastering English and so forth.
As FactCheck suggested: “To be accurate, the ad might have said that McCain ‘voted against a measure that would have denied illegal immigrants Social Security credit for their work once they gain legal status.’ But such a truthful statement might not strike New Hampshire voters as so damaging.”
So what did the Romney folks do?
Instead of using a truthful statement that would have made no impact on voters, they used a hateful lie --- that appears to have made little impact on voters.
As the Wall Street Journal editorialized today, Romney’s ill-advised attempt to demagogue the immigration issue and to “impersonate Tom Tancredo” has failed miserably, in Iowa and now in New Hampshire.
I happen to believe that Romney has fatally damaged his once-promising $100 million campaign by the flood of negative ads shamefully distorting the record of his various opponents.
Romney, who’s now desperate to pull out a last chance victory in Michigan, won’t apologize. But Hugh Hewitt, a fair-minded Republican leader of impeccable integrity, should offer that apology now.