Biden vs. Ryan Vice-Presidential Debate Fact-Check: Who Lied?
Biden exaggerated a few of Romney’s statements and Ryan
got some unemployment numbers wrong. The Daily Beast turns to the
Internet’s most reliable fact-checkers for the vice-presidential
candidates’ biggest slip-ups.
Biden: Mitt Romney called President Obama’s promise to end the Iraq war a “tragic mistake.”
This is an old one for Politifact, as President Obama has said it before. They point out,
yet again, that while Romney did use the word “tragic,” he was talking
about the pace of the 2011 drawdown of troops from Iraq, not the plan to
end the war in general, making Biden’s statement only half true.
Ryan: “You
know what the unemployment rate in Scranton is today? It’s 10 percent.
You know what it was the day you guys came in? 8.5 percent. That’s how
it’s going all around America.”
ABC’s Jon Karl
is a stickler for the numbers. Ryan was close on the unemployment rate
of Scranton, Penn.: it’s 9.6 percent, not 10, exactly, and when Obama
and Biden took office it was actually 8.4 percent, not 8.5. More
important, though, Scranton’s growing unemployment rate is not
representative of the rest of the country, where unemployment has
dropped from a high of 10 percent in October 2009 to 7.8 percent in
September, and was up a little, to 8.1 percent, prior to that.
Biden: “With
regard to the assault on the Catholic Church, let me make it absolutely
clear: No religious institution, Catholic or otherwise—including
Catholic Social Services, Georgetown Hospital, Mercy, any hospital—none
has to either refer contraception, none has to pay for contraception,
none has to be a vehicle to get contraception in any insurance policy
they provide. That is a fact.”
This
is all true, as of now, but when Biden declares that, “This is a fact,”
he puts himself in the position to be challenged. As The Washington Post’s Josh Hicks notes,
Biden was, in fact, the one who negotiated the exemption for religious
institutions for the Obamacare rule on employer-provided contraception,
but not all church organizations have accepted the changes to the
mandate, because they fear they will still end up paying for
contraception if their insurance costs go up as a result of the
mandate—a fear that is furthered by the Obama administration’s failure
to create an accommodation for religious organizations that self-insure
seven months after promising it would.
Ryan: Obama will reduce our Navy to the smallest it has been since before World War I.
Politifact called this absurd, giving it a score of “pants on fire.”
The basis for the statement—which Romney himself used in January—is the
number of ships in the Navy. In 1916, the Navy had 245 ships; as of
2011, the number was 285. Under George W. Bush, the numbers were even
lower (down to 278 at one point).
Biden: Romney “said, let [the auto industry] go bankrupt, period.”
Yes, we all know Romney wrote a New York Times op-ed that was headlined “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” He’ll never live it down. But Politifact isn’t convinced
by the suggestion that Romney had no interest in saving the auto
industry. First, they’ve previously pointed out that Romney himself did
not come up with that immortal headline or use those words anywhere in
the article or in subsequent interviews. Furthermore, the “managed
bankruptcy” he proposed for Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler instead
of a bailout, was intended to force car companies to lower their labor
costs and better their products so that they could save themselves—not
fail.
Ryan: “And
with respect to abortion, the Democratic Party used to say they should
be safe, legal, and rare, now they support it without restriction and
with taxpayer funding. Taxpayer funding in Obamacare, taxpayer funding
with foreign aid. The vice president himself went to China and said he
sympathized with, and would not second-guess, their one-child policy of
forced abortions and sterilizations. That to me is pretty extreme.”
Ryan’s claim that the new federal health-care law will use taxpayer funds to pay for abortions is easily disputed. In a July statement,
the Department of Health and Human Services confirms that the only
abortions covered will be those in cases of rape, incest, or danger to
the mother’s life.
Biden: “We weren’t told they wanted more security [in Benghazi]. We did not know.”
Biden: “We weren’t told they wanted more security [in Benghazi]. We did not know.”
Ryan
immediately disputed Biden’s claim that the White House didn’t know
more security was needed in Benghazi before the embassy attack.
According to testimony
given by the Obama administration this week, he was right. A top
security official in Libya said he was reprimanded for requesting more
security and admitted that by the time of the attack it was “abundantly
clear” help was not on its way.
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