A few days ago, Governor John Kasich claimed on Meet the Press that Mitt Romney had Ohio “in the bag.”

Perhaps Kasich was privy to Mitt Romney’s bold new strategy for the last week of the campaign for Ohio: lie his ass off and hope Ohio voters don’t notice.

It’s only Tuesday. Here are the blatant lies that the Romney campaign has launched in Ohio already this week in the final stretch of the campaign:

Lie #1: The auto bailout means that Chrysler is going to ship Ohio jobs to China.

It started with a speech by Romney in Northwest Ohio where he took a Bloomberg article about how Chrysler planned on reopening plants in China to produce its inventory in Asia (in addition to the new 1,000+ jobs it has already announced in Toledo and another 1,000 in Detroit) to suggest that Chrysler was planning to ship Ohio jobs to China… all of them. Then the Romney campaign backed it up with a television ad, even though the media had largely reported that Romney’s claim was totally false.



What’s interesting about the ad is that it’s a rotting onion of untruths, with a seemingly never-ending number of layers. Who could do more for the auto industry? Well, what has Mitt Romney ever done for the auto industry? Nothing. In fact, he criticized the federal government under Bush and Obama for doing too much for the auto industry in that infamous editorial (do we even need to provide a link?)

The ad resulted in a fact-check ad from the Obama campaign:



Every fact checker has rated Romney’s Jeep-to-China comments to be the lie it is. The Cleveland Plain Dealer even blasted Romney separately in an editorial today on the same day that PolitiFact rated it as “Pants on Fire.”

In the midst of being blasted by both the national and Ohio media for this lie, the Romney campaign double-down with an even more blatant lie about Jeep in a radio ad:



As the media is slack-jawed at the sheer brazenness of Romney’s unrepentant lying about the bailout and outsourcing, Romney finds himself not just getting fact checked by the Obama campaign, not just by the media, but the entire domestic auto industry which is openly calling Mitt Romney a liar a week before the election:

The CEO of Chrysler has issued a public letter debunking Romney’s lie. A spokesman for GM was more blunt:

“We’ve clearly entered some parallel universe during these last few days,” spokesman Greg Martin told the Detroit Free Press. “No amount of campaign politics at its cynical worst will diminish our record of creating jobs in the U.S. and repatriating profits back to this country.”

It should be noted that just a few days ago, the Romney campaign was publicly downplaying the auto rescue as being a major issue in Ohio. In fact, the campaign called it the President’s “one trick pony,” but mostly because that one-trick pony was outpacing Romney like it was Seabiscuit.

Lie #2: The return of the “abolishing the work requirement in welfare reform” lie.

Just like the Romney campaign breached its own precedent by not alerting the Ohio media of its new Jeep/China ad, the Romney campaign this week launched another ad without giving notice to the media— this one revisiting the widely debunked Romney lie that the Obama Administration has somehow “gutted” the work requirement in welfare reform (which, of course, is entirely untrue.) According to the Huffington Post, this ad is running in more conservative parts of Ohio– namely the Southwest and Southeastern parts of Ohio.

Lie #3: Mitt Romney won’t seek to overturn Roe v. Wade

Mitt Romney in 2007 as a candidate for President vowed to overturn Roe v. Wade. Just a few days ago, Romney re-affirmed his intention to end any federal funding for Planned Parenthood and as recently as January of this year in a GOP primary presidential debate, Romney said he wants to see Roe overturned.

Enter former Minnesota Senator/Romney surrogate Norm Coleman who told a group of Ohio Republican Jewish voters expressing concerns that Romney was beholden to social conservative extremists in the Republican Party:

Completely whitewashing Romney’s own position on Roe. Mitt Romney has made it perfectly clear that if he’s President, he’ll seek to nominate justices to the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Roe, just as George W. Bush attempted to do. Mitt Romney didn’t just revert back to the pro-choice politician he was when he was Governor of Massachusetts.

Lie #4: ObamaCare will increase Ohio insurance premiums by 50%

That’s a claim that a Forbes article made on Monday…. it just happens to be written by a Romney campaign health care adviser. It’s sole source for the claim… a study that was commissioned by Lt. Governor Mary Taylor, a rabid Obama health care reform opponent and issued over a year ago to make the case against creating a health care insurance exchange… which by nature are designed to reduce premiums, not increase them.

Think it’s just a coincidence that a Romney campaign advisor starts to brush off a report issued a year ago commissioned a year ago by one of the chief opponents of Obamacare in Ohio the final week of the election? Well, consider this, the Romney adviser omitted a key caveat to the report’s premium calculation (which again, is incredulous in the first place as the CBO projects a far more modest increase of 10%):

Prior to the application of the premium tax credit subsidy, the individual health insurance market premiums are estimated to increase by 55% to 85%… This is primarily driven by the estimated health status of the new individual health insurance market and the expansion of covered benefits. (emphasis added.)

In other words, this is what the Affordable Care Act would do to premiums… before you factor in the aspects of the law that lower the cost of premiums to Ohioans. It’s a completely dishonest smear of ObamaCare being offered by someone who, as a healthcare adviser supposedly read the Milliman report issued by Taylor’s office would know is completely dishonest, but knows most people who read his column won’t catch.

These are not the actions of a presidential campaign a week out that has Ohio “in the bag.” This is not what a campaign does when they are ahead. It’s a “Hail Mary” of deception. And it’s insulting to the intelligence of Ohio voters. Mitt Romney now claims that the auto bailout has created jobs in China, not Ohio. The only thing that could make this even more absurd is if Governor Kasich now announces JobsOhio magically prevented Romney’s made up jobs from leaving Ohio for China.

These are the actions of a dishonorable candidate who is so desperate to win he’ll say anything, no matter how ridiculously untrue it may be. Mitt Romney can’t defeat President Obama in Ohio on the facts, so he’s running on fictions.

And that’s all Ohioans need to know about how unqualified Mitt Romney is to be the Commander-in-Chief and President of this country. And it’s all you need to know about where the Romney campaign believes things stand for them politically in Ohio. These are the actions of a political animal at the end of his rope and nearly out of time.