Tuesday 24 July 2012

RNC Issues False Attack On Obama Over Daily Economic Briefings In New Web Ad .




U.S Presidential candidates Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

The Republican National Committee (RNC) continued its line of attack that President Barack Obama is neglecting the economy in the pursuit of his own reelection with the release of a new web ad on Tuesday that invokes a year-old report to make a false claim about Obama's engagement with his economic advisers.

As reported by the Huffington Post, after leading with the president's lack of meetings with his jobs council in the last six months - an issue turned into campaign fodder by presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney and members of GOP leadership in recent weeks - the web ad, "These Aren't Gaffes," flips to a new statistic: Obama has had "ZERO daily economic briefings in the last 12 months."

Its source? A report by the Hill from more than one year ago, in June 2011, pointing out that Obama's White House schedule no longer seemed to include the daily economic briefings he had requested upon taking office. 

It is true that at the time, the daily economic briefings had not formally appeared on the president's schedule for about a month. But in the same report, a White House official stated that Obama still received a daily economic briefing on paper.

Moreover, just a week after the Hill posted its story, the economic briefings returned to the president's schedule and still appears periodically on official guidance issued by the White House. This makes the RNC's statement -- that there have been zero daily economic briefings in 12 months -- false.

White House spokeswoman Amy Brundage confirmed to The Huffington Post that Obama continues to receive daily economic briefings in a variety of ways, including individual meetings with his economic advisors, group meetings with his economics team, paper briefings and meetings with outside advisors.

“The President receives daily briefings on the economy," Brundage told HuffPost in an email. "There is no other issue the President spends more time working on than strengthening our economy and getting the American people back to work.” Questioning the president's commitment to solving the nation's economic problems is hardly a new charge from his Republican opponents. But as Romney struggles to respond to the Obama campaign's attacks on his business record and mounting pressure to release his tax returns, Republicans have responded by ramping up their efforts to illustrate the president as focused solely on campaigning across the country at the expense of job creation.

But even while both campaigns have taken words out of context and run with so-called gaffes on numerous occasions this cycle, using a year-old news article to make a false claim signals the growing desperation among Republicans to quell talk of Romney and his background at Bain Capital. These attacks, according to polls, are proving to be successful across a host of key battleground states.


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