The Obama lie that Washington Post's The Fact Checker has called a whopper and gave four Pinocchios to, came during the third and final debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney when Obama said "The sequester is not something that I've proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed."
The Fact Checker calls it Obama's "fanciful claim" and details the evidence for their readers, then concludes by rating it a whopper in the last paragraphs of the piece:
No one disputes the fact that no one wanted sequestration, or that ultimately a bipartisan vote in Congress led to passage of the Budget Control Act. But the president categorically said that sequestration was “something that Congress has proposed.”
Woodward’s detailed account of meetings during the crisis, clearly based on interviews with key participants and contemporaneous notes, make it clear that sequestration was a proposal advanced and promoted by the White House.
In sum: Gene Sperling brought up the idea of a sequester, while Jack Lew sold Harry Reid on the idea and then decided to use the Gramm-Hollings-Rudman language (which he knew from his days of working for Tip O’Neill) as a template for sequester. The proposal was so unusual for Republicans that staffers had to work through the night to understand it.
Oddly, Lew in Tampa on Thursday, publicly asserted the opposite: “There was an insistence on the part of Republicans in Congress for there to be some automatic trigger…. [It] was very much rooted in the Republican congressional insistence that there be an automatic measure at the end.”
This prompted Woodward to go over his notes and interviews once again, to make sure he had gotten it right.
“After reviewing all the interviews and the extensive material I have on this issue, it looks like President Obama told a whopper,” Woodward said. “Based on what Jack Lew said in Florida today, I have asked the White House to correct the record.”
We had been wavering between Three and Four Pinocchios. But in light’s of Lew’s decision to doubledown on Obama’s claim, we agree it’s a whopper.
Obama went all out on misinformation during that final debate, as 15 misrepresentations and outright lies have already been documented and detailed.
