Romnesia? No, Obamafuscation: Hiding His Pro-Abortion Record

Opinion   |   Carol Tobias   |   Oct 22, 2012   |   10:43AM   |   Washington, DC

It’s funny, really, to see an obfuscator of the truth getting caught red handed. For months, the Obama campaign ran hundreds of millions of dollars in ads falsely framing Mitt Romney’s positions on everything from health care rationing to taxes. But when Romney finally had a chance in the debates to speak directly to the American people and tell them what his true positions are, Obama’s falsehoods boomeranged on him. Badly.

The debates exposed Obama’s phony campaign narrative of who Romney is and what he would do in office. Obama’s been dropping in the polls ever since.

Give Obama credit, though, for not giving up. His campaign has come up with a new tack – now they’re claiming that their misrepresentations of Romney’s positions were correct, it’s just that Romney changed them since they ran all those negative ads!

In fact, they’re so desperate to keep their discredited narrative alive that they’re saying Romney must be forgetting his previous positions, that he must have what Obama is now mockingly calling “Romnesia.”

Well, here at National Right to Life, we have our own word for the president’s “memory,” for his particular way of handling the truth.

Obamafuscation.

National Right to Life had our first experience with Obamafuscation during the 2008 presidential campaign. Obama had a problem he badly needed a solution for. He had as embarrassing a vote as a candidate might ever have to defend: he had voted, as a member of the Illinois State Senate, against protections for unborn babies who were delivered alive in abortions.

Some of these babies were being put aside in cold hospital pans and left to die. No treatment was being given to them, no comfort care, no hope.

To offer these babies some protection, bills called the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act were introduced both in Congress and in the Illinois legislature.

The federal bill passed 98-0. That made Obama’s opposition to the Illinois bill seem all the more extreme. It meant that Obama wouldn’t even support protections for born-alive children that even staunch pro-abortion U.S. Senators like Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein had voted for! Obviously, his Illinois votes could have been a public relations disaster for his campaign.

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So he Obamafuscated. First, he claimed he would have supported the federal bill, but the Illinois bill was different. But National Right to Life pointed out that the federal bill and the second of the Illinois bills (which he also had opposed) were identical and the operative language in the two was identical.

That led Obama to lay on the Obamafuscation even more. In an interview with the Christian news organization CBN.com, he said about National Right to Life: “ . . . they have not been telling the truth. And I hate to say that people are lying, but here’s a situation where folks are lying.” But various fact check groups matched the language in the federal bill that passed 98-0 and the Illinois bill that Obama had opposed, and they verified that National Right to Life’s reports of Obama’s vote was correct. According to the New York Sun, Obama’s campaign then “acknowledged that he had voted against an identical bill in the state Senate.” Needless to say, National Right to Life never received an apology from Obama for saying we were “lying.”

This year, Obamafuscation has been observed in the president’s comments on health care, on Planned Parenthood, on the Obamacare mandate, on Libya, on taxes, and of course, on a whole range of Romney’s issue positions which the Obama campaign simply made up out of whole cloth.

The Obama campaign is hoping their cute phrase, “Romnesia,” catches on with the media and the public as a way to ridicule his opponent. But what the president did, not telling the truth about innocent unborn babies who would have suffered horrible deaths if his votes had prevailed, is beneath ridicule. It is a moral question. And no one has a right to frame a moral question in such a way that the framing itself is intrinsically immoral.

Obama’s penchant for doing that is just one of the many reasons to defeat him in 2012. I hope you will help us accomplish that and protect the lives of perhaps millions of unborn children with your support.

The National Right to Life Victory Fund is working overtime to find every possible vote in every possible corner of every swing state. We are also working hard to elect pro-life U.S. Senators and Representatives who will vote to protect the lives of the unborn and protect you from having your tax dollars used for the killing.

Don’t let the Obama campaign unfairly frame Mitt Romney again with their catch phrases, when Barack Obama has earned his own with his loose treatment of the truth!

LifeNews Note: Carol Tobias is the president of the National Right to Life Committee.