Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Interactive Feature: Anatomy of a Speech: Republican National Convention

When Representative Paul D. Ryan fired up the party faithful with his speech Wednesday night at the Republican National Convention, he made several statements that were incorrect, incomplete or incompatible with his own record in Congress.

Mr. Ryan chided President Obama for dismissing the recommendations of a deficit-reduction commission that Mr. Ryan served on and whose plans he opposed, and for seeking Medicare cuts that he too once sought. He seemed to criticize the president for the closing of an auto plant in his hometown, Janesville, Wis., even though General Motors made the decision to shut the plant down in 2008, before Mr. Obama was elected. And he made misleading statements on a number of issues, including the president’s health care law and Mitt Romney’s record in Massachusetts.

“The people of Wisconsin, like so many Americans, are still waiting for the president’s imaginary recovery,” said a spokesman for Mr. Ryan, Brendan Buck.

Mr. Obama did bail out the auto industry, and included money in the stimulus for “green” energy products, but the Janesville plant did not benefit.

One of Mr. Ryan’s most pointed attacks on Mr. Obama was on the deficit. “He created a new bipartisan debt commission,’’ Mr. Ryan noted. “They came back with an urgent report. He thanks them, sent them on their way, and then did exactly nothing.”

Left unsaid: Mr. Ryan served on that debt commission, and his opposition to its final proposals helped to seal its fate. The commission, known as the Simpson-Bowles deficit-reduction commission, made a number of recommendations that Mr. Ryan ultimately opposed on the grounds that they would have raised some taxes and failed to cut enough from health programs. His dismissal of the plan was seen as an important blow to its chances of success, since it soured other House Republicans on it.

In his critique of the president’s fiscal stewardship, Mr. Ryan said: “It began with a perfect AAA credit rating for the United States. It ends with the downgraded America.”

When Standard & Poor’s lowered the nation’s credit rating, it was in large part because of the standoff last year over raising the debt ceiling — which had to be raised to pay for spending Congress had already approved. The White House had asked Congress to simply raise the debt ceiling; Mr. Ryan and House Republicans balked at doing so without a deal on significant spending cuts, leading to a prolonged standoff that took the nation to the brink of default.

In its statement explaining the downgrade, Standard & Poor’s wrote that “the political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed. The statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default have become political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy.”

Mr. Ryan spoke out forcefully Wednesday night against the “$716 billion funneled out of Medicare by President Obama” without noting that his own past budget plans had counted on the same savings, and pledged to protect Medicare without explaining how the Romney-Ryan plan would change it.

The Medicare debate is shaping up as central to the election: Democrats say that the Romney-Ryan plan to reshape Medicare would force future beneficiaries to pay more for their health care, while Republicans fault Mr. Obama for the $716 billion cut in future growth.

Mr. Ryan and Mr. Romney have proposed limiting the government’s current open-ended financial commitment to Medicare. Under their plan, the government would contribute a fixed amount of money on behalf of each beneficiary, and future beneficiaries could use that money to buy private insurance or to help pay for coverage under the traditional Medicare program. It would apply only to people under 55.

Mr. Ryan’s earlier budget plans called for capping the rate at which Medicare spending would grow — which analysts from groups including the Kaiser Family Foundation have said would lead to higher out of pocket costs for future beneficiaries. The Romney campaign now says that its plan would work differently from Mr. Ryan’s original plan, and that it would have the flexibility to raise the proposed cap on spending if it does not keep up with costs.

The $716 billion cut to Medicare that President Obama made would reduce payments to health maintenance organizations, hospitals and many other health care providers.

And Mr. Ryan’s remarks about the auto plant in Janesville ricocheted around the Internet almost as soon as he uttered them.

He appeared to fault Mr. Obama for the closing of the plant — a decision made before Mr. Obama was elected, and before his bailout of the auto industry, which was credited with saving a number of other auto plants. He noted in his speech that Mr. Obama had visited the plant in 2008 and told people that “I believe that if our government is there to support you, this plant will be here for another hundred years.”

“Well, as it turned out,” Mr. Ryan said, “that plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day.”

As a candidate, Mr. Obama spoke at the Janesville plant in February 2008, a day after General Motors had posted a $38 billion loss. He gave a speech on economic policy. By that October – a month before the election – General Motors had already made plans to begin closing the Janesville plant because of the steep falloff in the sale of sport utility vehicles.

An article in The New York Times that October said: “On Oct. 13, G.M. announced that its 90-year-old plant there, the company’s oldest factory in the United States, would build its last S.U.V. just before the Christmas holidays.” It took some time for the plant to shut down, and some work continued there into Mr. Obama’s term in office. But the decision to close the plant had been made earlier — as can be seen by this June 2008 letter from Mr. Ryan urging G.M. to reconsider.

The Ryan campaign said Thursday that the issue was not when the plant stopped production, but the fact that it has not restarted — and pointed to accounts of an Obama campaign statement from the fall of 2008 in which he said, “I will lead an effort to retool plants like the G.M. facility in Janesville so we can build the fuel-efficient cars of tomorrow and create good-paying jobs in Wisconsin and all across America.”

There were other areas in which Mr. Ryan made incomplete or misleading statements.

• “What did taxpayers get out of the Obama stimulus?” he asked. “More debt.” Left unmentioned: the fact that roughly a third of the stimulus came in the form of tax cuts.

• Mr. Ryan referred to “government-controlled health care,” though the new health care law relies heavily on private insurance, did not nationalize the health care system as other countries have done, and did not ultimately include the “public option” that many Democrats had wanted.

• And when he spoke of Mr. Romney’s record as the governor of Massachusetts, he said: “He was the Republican governor of a state where almost 9 in 10 legislators are Democrats and yet he balanced the budget without raising taxes.” Mr. Romney did raise more revenue to balance those budgets, though: as governor he closed a number of tax loopholes in ways requiring business to pay hundreds of millions of dollars more in taxes.