FACT CHECK: Obama and his gallery of rogues

Pres­i­dent Barack Obama speaks to work­ers at the Alcoa Dav­en­port Works fac­tory in Bet­ten­dorf, Iowa, Tuesday.

CALVIN WOODWARD

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — Pres­i­dent Barack Obama seems to have for­got­ten about Al Gore and the ash­tray smashed to smithereens. Obama told a news con­fer­ence Wednes­day he was going where no pres­i­dent had gone before in attack­ing bur­den­some fed­eral regulations.

In real­ity, many pres­i­dents have been there and done that. Bill Clin­ton, for one, ordered a sweep­ing review of the thicket of rules and his vice pres­i­dent took a ham­mer to the ash­tray on TV to under­score one dumb regulation.

Reg­u­la­tions, cor­po­rate jet own­ers, hedge fund man­agers and Moam­mar Gad­hafi formed a sort of rogue’s gallery in Obama’s remarks as the pres­i­dent talked about debt nego­ti­a­tions with Repub­li­cans, the NATO cam­paign in Libya, the war in Afghanistan and more. But the tale behind each rogue is more com­plex than was told.

A look at some of his state­ments and how they com­pare with the facts:

OBAMA: “What I have done — and this is unprece­dented, by the way, no administration’s done this before — is I’ve said to each agency, don’t just look at cur­rent reg­u­la­tions or don’t just look at future reg­u­la­tions, reg­u­la­tions that we’re propos­ing, let’s go back­wards and look at reg­u­la­tions that are already on the books, and if they don’t make sense, let’s get rid of them. And we are in the process of doing that, and we’ve already iden­ti­fied changes that could poten­tially save bil­lions of dol­lars for com­pa­nies over the next sev­eral years.”

THE FACTS: Plenty of other pres­i­dents have gone on the hunt for need­less fed­eral regulations.

Clin­ton gave the job of “rein­vent­ing gov­ern­ment” to his vice pres­i­dent, Gore, who wielded the ham­mer on David Letterman’s “Late Show” in 1993 to demon­strate silly fed­eral rules on ash­tray safety. Clin­ton signed an exec­u­tive order direct­ing agen­cies to elim­i­nate half of all inter­nal reg­u­la­tions, and a com­pan­ion order tak­ing aim at reg­u­la­tions that affect peo­ple out­side of government.

The Gov­ern­ment Account­abil­ity Office reported in 2007: “Every pres­i­dent since Pres­i­dent Carter has directed agen­cies to eval­u­ate or recon­sider exist­ing reg­u­la­tions. For exam­ple, Pres­i­dent Carter’s Exec­u­tive Order 12044 required agen­cies to peri­od­i­cally review exist­ing rules; one charge of Pres­i­dent Reagan’s task force on reg­u­la­tory relief was to rec­om­mend changes to exist­ing reg­u­la­tions; Pres­i­dent George H.W. Bush instructed agen­cies to iden­tify exist­ing reg­u­la­tions to elim­i­nate unnec­es­sary reg­u­la­tory bur­den; and Pres­i­dent Clin­ton, under sec­tion 5 of Exec­u­tive Order 12866, required agen­cies to develop a pro­gram to ‘peri­od­i­cally review’ exist­ing sig­nif­i­cant reg­u­la­tions. In 2001, 2002, and 2004, the admin­is­tra­tion of Pres­i­dent George W. Bush asked the pub­lic to sug­gest reforms of exist­ing regulations.”

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OBAMA: “I’ve said to some of the Repub­li­can lead­ers, ‘You go talk to your con­stituents — the Repub­li­can con­stituents — and ask them, are they will­ing to com­pro­mise their kids’ safety so that some cor­po­rate jet owner con­tin­ues to get a tax break?’ And I’m pretty sure what the answer would be.”

THE FACTS: Obama men­tioned the tax break on cor­po­rate jets six times, enough so a viewer might think elim­i­nat­ing it would be offer sig­nif­i­cant sav­ings to the government.

The ben­e­fit, which relates to how cor­po­ra­tions write off the value of pri­vate jets, is worth just about $3 bil­lion over 10 years, accord­ing to Repub­li­can con­gres­sional aides. The White House doesn’t dis­pute the fig­ure. That pales next to the $400 bil­lion or so in addi­tional tax rev­enue Democ­rats have pro­posed in bud­get nego­ti­a­tions, and it’s neg­li­gi­ble com­pared with the $2 trillion-plus Repub­li­cans want to cut to match a two-year increase in the debt ceil­ing. There is also no direct rela­tion­ship between pre­serv­ing that tax break and cut­ting spend­ing in any par­tic­u­lar bud­get area, despite Obama’s sug­ges­tion that fed­eral pro­grams for child safety would be at risk.

Instead, Obama seemed intent on high­light­ing an area of spend­ing that the pub­lic might view as par­tic­u­larly egre­gious in a fal­ter­ing econ­omy, although he didn’t sug­gest it would solve the entire prob­lem. Other tax breaks he men­tioned get­ting rid of Wednes­day were for “mil­lion­aires and bil­lion­aires,” oil com­pa­nies and hedge fund managers.

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OBAMA: “Moam­mar Gad­hafi, who prior to Osama bin Laden was respon­si­ble for more Amer­i­can deaths than just about any­body on the planet, was threat­en­ing to mas­sacre his people.”

THE FACTS: Gadhafi’s his­tory of sup­port­ing ter­ror­ist acts lethal to Amer­i­cans did not stop the Obama admin­is­tra­tion, like the Bush admin­is­tra­tion before it, from cul­ti­vat­ing a rela­tion­ship with him after he renounced ter­ror­ism. Gadhafi’s gov­ern­ment shared infor­ma­tion on its nuclear pro­gram, tipped Wash­ing­ton about Islamic mil­i­tants after the 2001 ter­ror­ist attacks and per­suaded West­ern nations to lift sanctions.

Indeed, the Obama admin­is­tra­tion treated him with kid gloves in March 2010 after then-spokesman P.J. Crow­ley at the State Depart­ment joked about Gadhafi’s call for a holy war against Switzer­land. The spokesman apol­o­gized for mak­ing com­ments that were “per­ceived as a per­sonal attack” against the Libyan leader and expressed regret that the remarks became “an obsta­cle to fur­ther progress in our bilat­eral relationship.”

Obama only refo­cused on Gadhafi’s past when a con­tin­ued rela­tion­ship became unten­able after the crack­down on oppo­nents of the Libyan gov­ern­ment and the sub­se­quent air cam­paign by U.S. and NATO forces.

Obama no doubt was refer­ring to U.S. deaths from ter­ror­ist acts, not from foes in wartime, when he likened Gad­hafi to bin Laden. The 1988 bomb­ing of Pan Am 103 over Locker­bie, Scot­land, an act tied to Libya, killed 270 peo­ple, 189 of them Amer­i­can. Two Amer­i­cans died in a Berlin disco bomb­ing that wounded hun­dreds in 1986, and seven Amer­i­cans were among the 170 dead when UTA Flight 772 crashed in the Niger desert in 1989 after a suit­case bomb exploded. Those attacks also were traced to Libya.

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Asso­ci­ated Press writ­ers Nancy Benac, Erica Werner and Matthew Lee con­tributed to this report.

Posted by AP News on Jun 29 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.