“Within one month of me taking office, we signed into law the biggest middle-class tax cut in history.”
President Obama said that Monday. Previous tax cuts have reduced the middle-class’s tax burden more, however. When the Washington Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler asked the White House about this, he got this response:
So, when Obama calls a tax cut “big” he’s not speaking in terms of dollars, but in terms of people. That’s not a totally illegitimate use of the word, but it’s not the way anyone would interpret his remark, considering he provided no clarification.
You might think this is a nitpick — Obama meant “broadest” and he said “biggest.” But it reflects a pattern.
This is often President Obama’s way of misleading. He uses words in ways that nobody else uses them. In other words, he says some words, intending to mean one thing, presumably knowing his audience will hear something else.
He did this on lobbying. In his State of the Union Address, Obama said, “We have excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs.” But I counted fifty ex-lobbyists in policymaking jobs. So I asked the White House about this. The response: “As the President said, we have turned away lobbyists for many, many positions.”
America heard “we haven’t hired lobbyists.” Obama had to know that’s how it would sound. But he meant “there are some lobbyists who didn’t get the job in our administration for which they applied.”
And here’s an example from my column at the start of the Libya invasion, back in March:
It depends on what the meaning of “exit” is, I guess. ABC News White House reporter Jake Tapper responded to Obama’s word games: “Planes in the air? Ships in the Mediterranean? Intelligence being provided? Doesn’t sound like an exit strategy at all.”
Again, Obama’s intended meanings often fit somewhere in the big tent of reasonable interpretations of his words. But once you realize that the President’s meaning is frequently different from the standard understanding of his words, it becomes pretty difficult to trust him, because unless you can conceive of every possible interpretation, you can’t be sure you know what he’s actually saying.
