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http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/romney-touts-a-book-but-reads-it-selectively/

Romney Touts a Book, but Reads It Selectively

Evan Vucci/Associated PressMitt Romney spoke at a campaign stop on Wednesday at the U.S.A.A. insurance company in San Antonio.
SAN ANTONIO — Mitt Romney is not a candidate who often cites what he’s been reading, but lately, he has referred to a book “by a guy named Noam Scheiber” to accuse the president of deliberately slowing the economic recovery to first push health reform.

The book, “The Escape Artists,” published in February, is a behind-the-scenes account of President Obama’s top economic advisers confronting the financial crisis during his first years in office.

Mentioning a passage on Wednesday he called “pretty disturbing,” Mr. Romney said the book recounts that within the administration, “there was discussion about the fact that Obamacare would slow down the economic recovery in this country.”

“And they knew that before they passed it,” he said. “But they concluded that we would all forget how long the recovery took once it had happened, so they decided to go ahead.”

It is a decision “which I think deserves a lot of explaining,” Mr. Romney said.

But this account of the book, which Mr. Romney has given two or three times in recent weeks, is disputed by no less than the author, Mr. Scheiber, a senior editor at The New Republic. After Mr. Romney apparently first publicly mentioned “The Escape Artists,” at a May 18 rally in New Hampshire, Mr. Scheiber posted a blog item accusing Mr. Romney of twisting his words.

Mr. Romney’s account is apparently drawn from an interview Mr. Scheiber conducted with Lawrence H. Summers, the former chief economic adviser to Mr. Obama. Mr. Summers told Mr. Scheiber that it was “unlikely” that pursuing health care would slow the recovery — not, as Mr. Romney describes, that the president’s advisers knew this to be the case. Here is the passage from the book:

“I always admired the president’s courage for recognizing that 50 years from now, people would remember that all Americans had health care,” Larry Summers later said in an interview. “And even if pursuing health care affected the pace of the recovery, which was unlikely in my view, people wouldn’t remember how fast the recovery from this recession was.”

Mr. Romney referred to the book at a private fund-raiser in recent days, and on Wednesday, after he mentioned it at a public campaign event here, his version was disputed by the Obama campaign in a statement as “willfully dishonest.”

Mr. Scheiber, in his New Republic blog post, said that although Mr. Romney misrepresented administration thinking, there was “a kernel of truth” to his interpretation of Mr. Scheiber’s view in the book.

“I argue that Obama really was more focused on long-term, historically significant accomplishments than marginal, near-term differences in the pace of the recovery,” Mr. Scheiber wrote.


Eric D. Schwerin
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