After President Barack Obama stumbled his way to a loss in the first presidential debate on Wednesday night, Democratic National Committee communications director Brad Woodhouse took to MSNBC to try to spin criticism back in the direction of Mitt Romney with what appeared to be a fabricated claim.
“He wants to go back to war in Iraq,” Woodhouse said of Romney during a Thursday morning appearance on MSNBC.
In response, Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul told The Daily Caller that Woodhouse’s statement wasn’t true.
Woodhouse was asked about the nonpartisan analyses that show President Obama’s claim of having a $4 trillion deficit reduction plan isn’t true. One reason why that those analyses claim Obama’s deficit reduction is nothing more than a “gimmick,” is because it is “counting $1 trillion in savings by drawing down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
The MSNBC hosts pushed Woodhouse to respond to the claim that “nonpartisan budget experts call that a gimmick because the wars were deficit-financed in the first place.”
That’s when Woodhouse started by saying he disagrees with those nonpartisan analyses and shifted into his attack on Romney.
Romney wants to increase funding for the Pentagon and “wants to go back to war in Iraq,” Woodhouse said. “Those should be concerns of the American people. Those would explode the deficit. He didn’t lay out one single detail about how other than going after big bird how he would deal with the deficit last night. Not one single detail.”
Woodhouse has not responded to a request for comment – or given an explanation as to how he could have thought Romney wants to go back to war in Iraq.
Woodhouse could have been referring to 2011 statements by Romney in which he criticized the president’s plan on how he was going to withdraw from Iraq – calling that “tragic.”
In early September, Obama twisted that Romney comment and said that Romney called ending the war in Iraq at all was “tragic.” PolitiFact ripped Obama for that line of attack on Romney, calling it a “half-true” statement.