WaPo Fact Checking Romney's Jobs Claim

[Amelia]

Since WaPo's earlier fact check comments made such widespread news, this later look deserves notice. LOL @ the snark at the end, but they had to add that or they might have lost their cred.

“And four of the companies that we invested in — they weren’t businesses I ran, but we invested in — ended up today having some 120,000 jobs. Some of the businesses we invested in weren’t successful and lost jobs….. We invested in well over a hundred different businesses.”

— Mitt Romney

A new and tweaked number from the former Massachusetts governor! Last week, we said his claim of helping to create more than 100,000 new jobs was untenable.

Romney is on more solid ground now. First he makes clear his company, Bain Capital, was only an investor. Then he focuses on four companies (presumably Staples, Sports Authority, Bright Horizons and Steel Dynamics, which he has mentioned on the campaign trail) and clarifies that now they employ this many people.

Finally, he acknowledges that some investments were not successful. A clever and reasonably accurate framing of the figures that, on the surface, is not a pull-back of the earlier statements. We wonder how many staff hours it took to come up with this phrasing.

Fact Checking the Fox News-WSJ debate in South Carolina - The Washington Post