2012 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION Be your own fact-checker for debate

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

There they go again. Or do they?

Will Mitt Romney miscount the number of unemployed, as he has before? Will President Barack Obama’s dubious claim of a peace dividend, bopped down in the last debate, rise again? When Obama and his Republican challenger debate tonight, the media’s fact-checking corps will be watching for problematic claims that have popped up repeatedly in the campaign, as well as brand new ones.

You can play fact-check Whac-a-Mole on debate night, too. You might have your hands full: The format, driven by questions from the audience, could shake things looser than usual.

Shades of mistruth are more common than whoppers. Often, the offense is one of omission: an accurate as-far-as-it-goes assertion that ignores something important, such as the other side of the ledger. And, at times, the debaters tweak a statement to make it closer to right.

Here’s a guide some of the leading misleading statements of the campaign:

OBAMA

The president has told the nation he wants to take “some of the money that we’re saving as we wind down two wars to rebuild America,” as he put it in the last debate. There is no such pile of cash. The wars were financed mostly with borrowing. So treating the end of wars as a financial bonanza just means continuing to go deeper in debtto fix roads, bridges and the like.

The president frequently talks about a plan to cut the deficit by $4 trillion. Impressive number, but it’s not cut and dried. For one thing, he’s banking more than $2 trillion already achieved in law, after a deal with Republicans last year. Moreover, he uses creative accounting to hide a huge cache of spending on Medicare reimbursements to doctors. So any claim like the one in the last debate, “I’ve proposed a specific $4 trillion deficit reduction plan,” could rate a bop.

“Gov. Romney’s central economic plan calls for a $5 trillion tax cut.” Here Obama uses an estimate from the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research group, that Romney’s tax cuts would reduce federal revenue by $465 billion in 2015. Multiply that by 10 years — a common budgeting procedure in Washington — and he is in the ballpark in talking about $5 trillion. But Obama leaves out Romney’s proposals to reduce or eliminate tax credits, deductions and exemptions. He is only counting half the plan.

Obama has something to crow about when he talks about the auto bailout, which almost certainly saved General Motors and Chrysler. His estimate that up to 1 million jobs were saved is based on a 2010 study by the Center for Automotive Research, an industry think tank. But Obama rarely acknowledges that his predecessor, George W. Bush, began the auto bailout that he inherited and expanded.

ROMNEY

The Republican nominee has taken various shortcuts with jobless numbers, to the point of wildly misstating them at times. In the first debate, just before the improved September jobless figures came out, Romney said in one instance the U.S. has “23 million people out of work.” A bit more accurately, he said earlier in the debate that there are “23 million people out of work or stopped looking for work.” But even that was off by close to 9 million.

Romney’s vow to “get us to a balanced budget” is notably short of specifics and complicated by proposals in his agenda that conflict with that goal. He promises, at once, to cut taxes, restore Medicare cuts, spend more on the armed forces — and balance the budget by 2020. He’s laid out an ambitious goal of bringing federal spending below 20 percent of the economy, but he’s provided only a few modest examples of the massive cuts that would be needed. He’s steering clear of proposals to touch the huge entitlement programs in the short run, leaving only a limited portion of the federal budget to trim.

Romney continually portrays Obamacare as a budget-buster, although the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office has consistently said the law actually will reduce the deficit. This is more than an unsupported slam on the health care law itself. It also goes to Romney’s promise to balance the budget. He suggests that repealing the law will help him get to black ink. Romney’s claim is further complicated because he would negate one big money-saver in the law, the $716 billion in Medicare spending cuts he promises to restore.

He’s also made selective use of forecasts about how many people will still have job-based health insurance. The Congressional Budget office “says up to 20 million people will lose their insurance as Obama-care goes into effect,” he stated in the last debate. If he makes that claim again, consider that he was citing the worst-case scenario of four sketched by the budget office. Its best-case scenario was that 3 million people may gain coverage at work.