Organizations: American Enterprise Institute

Americans For Job Security: “Running”

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Americans for Job Security portrays the economy as still mired in recession, using a woman’s voiceover to suggest that President Obama has failed “to turn the economy around.” But while the economy has yet to dig out of the massive, nearly unprecedented hole created by the 2007-08 financial crisis, it has certainly turned around. The economy was hemorrhaging nearly a million jobs each month when President Bush handed over to Obama, and today the economy has been adding jobs for 30 months – two and a half years straight. Just as the ad’s depiction of the recent past is inaccurate, its insinuations about our immediate future are not supported by the evidence.

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Crossroads GPS: “Broke”

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Crossroads GPS calls President Obama “dishonest on taxes,” claiming that the Affordable Care Act imposed a “huge tax increase” on the middle class while Mitt Romney’s tax plan will cut middle-class taxes by 20 percent. But the health care law does not raise taxes on most Americans, and it actually provides tax relief for millions. Moreover, despite Romney’s rhetoric, his plan would require significant middle-class tax increases in order to remain deficit-neutral, which he insists it will.

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Crossroads GPS: “Bunch of Cash”

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Crossroads GPS is up with an ad in Nevada that features President Obama saying, “don’t blow a bunch of cash on Vegas,” a phrase taken completely out of context to suggest that the president is dismissive of Nevada’s tourism-driven economy. But the president wasn’t denigrating Las Vegas or advising people not to go there, he was speaking about the choices families must make about how to prioritize their spending in a recession. In addition, the ad blames Obama for a lackluster recovery, even though the last 30 months of private-sector job growth have been dragged down by GOP-favored public-sector downsizing.

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YG Action Fund: “Something New”

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The Eric Cantor-linked YG Action Fund super PAC is attacking Bill Enyart, the Democratic nominee in Illinois’ 12th district, with an ad belittling him for having “little private-sector experience,” failing to acknowledge that his public-sector jobs have consisted of 30-plus years serving his country in the armed forces. The ad is also critical of Enyart’s suggestion that the economy is improving and of his support for the Affordable Care Act, but the private sector has added 4.6 million jobs over 30 straight months of growth, and repealing the health care law would have devastating consequences for the millions of Americans already benefitting from its reforms.

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American Crossroads: “Forward?”

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American Crossroads is countering the Democratic National Convention with an ad claiming that President Obama has taken the country “backward,” citing what the ad calls “America’s worst economic recovery ever.” However, the ad ignores the severity of the recession President Bush left behind, as well as the decline in government employment (which conservatives favor) that distinguishes the current recovery from previous ones. Indeed, the private sector has grown steadily for the past 30 months, adding 4.6 million jobs during that period. Crossroads also dishonestly calls the Affordable Care Act a “tax on middle-class families” and blames the president for deficits that are fueled by Bush policies and the recession.

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American Future Fund: “Tomorrow”

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A dramatic ad from the American Future Fund features a woman describing her worries about the economy, her husband’s job, stimulus spending, and debt, but getting a lot of details wrong as she blames New Mexico Senate candidate Martin Heinrich for the her woes. The ad cites an article about a Recovery Act-funded car company building cars in Finland, but all the money loaned to that business supported work done in the U.S. Four-and-a-half million private-sector jobs have been added over the last 29 straight months of unemployment, and it was Bush policies and the recession that drove up the debt.

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Americans For Prosperity: “It’s Time For New Ideas”

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Americans for Prosperity has released another ad featuring people who say they voted for President Obama but don’t think he deserves a second term. However, the only substantive claim in the ad – that the economy “is still the same as it was four years ago” – is simply untrue. The economy was losing hundreds of thousands of jobs per month when Obama took office. Now, the private sector is steadily growing, as evidenced by 4.5 million jobs added over 29 consecutive months of growth.

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Crossroads GPS: “Channel”

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An ad from Crossroads GPS hits Sen. Sherrod Brown with a series of misleading insinuations, suggesting that Brown approved of a “health care takeover” and job-killing taxes on Ohio businesses. But the health care law relies on the private sector, and neither it nor Brown’s most recent vote for the Middle Class Tax Relief Act raise taxes for most Americans. What’s more, the Recovery Act didn’t ‘fail – it helped keep the recession that killed millions of jobs from being even worse.

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Crossroads GPS: “More Martin Spending”

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Crossroads GPS attacks Rep. Martin Heinrich (D-NM) for supporting the Recovery Act, implying that the “failed stimulus” – and not the devastating recession that was well underway when Heinrich took office – is responsible for job losses in New Mexico. However, the Recovery Act created jobs and cut taxes for millions of Americans, while New Mexico’s unemployment rate has fallen almost 1.5 percentage points from its recession-driven high.

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D’Souza: President Obama Thinks “We Are The Evil Empire”

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In an August 20 interview with Center for Security Policy president Frank Gaffney, anti-Obama author Dinesh D’Souza said:

Well, we normally thing we’re having a policy debate between liberals and conservatives who agree on about goals but disagree about means. And I think when you’re dealing with a Bill Clinton, for example, that is true. We all want a prosperous economy, we all want America to be a force for freedom in the world, we’d like America to stay number one as long as possible. See, I think Obama stands outside this consensus. And he does so, again, not because he’s a traitor but because he subscribes to a very radical Third World ideology that sees America as the rogue nation in the world. You’ll remember, Frank, as well as anyone else Reagan’s phrase “the evil empire,” referring to the Soviet Union. I think from Obama’s point of view, we are the evil empire, we are the one that needs to be contained. And this actually, once you put on these spectacles, you will see that pretty much everything Obama’s doing makes complete sense.

D’Souza is the president of Kings College, and a former scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institution.

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