MSNBC host Rachel Maddow again used a faulty attack against Mitt Romney--implying that he believes it would be a failure for President Obama to not achieve 4 percent unemployment, in a Thursday segment of her show:
MADDOW: You know it's the same thing with the unemployment rate, right? So, earlier this month, Mitt Romney said that having the unemployment rate down to 8.1 was not something he was happy about--there'd be no cause for celebration until it was down to 4 percent. He also said, with Mark Halperin, that by the end of his first term, he'd like to have it at 6 percent--which is where the CBO predicts it's going to go anyway, if we keep just doing what our current policies are. So it would be a failure for President Obama not to hit 4 percent, but Mitt Romney's going to do 6 percent.
Maddow took heat Wednesday for misrepresenting statements Romney had made about the unemployment rate. Dylan Byers of Politico noted:
Then, speaking for herself, Maddow said: "Mitt Romney says anything over 4 percent is a failure of the Obama administration, then two-and-a-half weeks later says his own goal is 6 percent unemployment."
That is incorrect — which is to say, false. Mitt Romney did not say that unemployment over 4 percent is a failure of the Obama administration. He said it was not cause for celebration. Furthermore, in his interview with Halperin, Romney did not say that his own goal of 6 percent unemployment would be cause for celebration either. He merely said that that was his own goal… Maddow did not get the facts right. Instead, she invented her own facts — specifically, she invented a statement and attributed it to Mitt Romney, despite the fact that he never made it.