Due Diligence: Attack takes Obama out of context

Restore Our Future, a Super PAC backing Mitt Romney, said this week it is spending more than $10 million to run a new ad in swing states attacking President Obama over the economy. The ad features a series of quotes from the president before pivoting to hit him for "shameful, dishonest attacks."

Let's zero in on one moment in the ad: Right after the narrator says the president is denying reality, it shows the president stating "we tried our plan, and it worked." The suggestion is the president believes that the economy has recovered fully from the depths of the recession - despite the fact that unemployment remains above eight percent.

The problem is that Mr. Obama wasn't talking about his own administration when he made that comment. He was talking about the economy under Bill Clinton. Check out the quote in context, from a July campaign event in California.

"I'll cut out government spending that's not working, that we can't afford, but I'm also going to ask anybody making over $250,000 a year to go back to the tax rates they were paying under Bill Clinton, back when our economy created 23 million new jobs, the biggest budget surplus in history and everybody did well," he said. "Just like we've tried their plan, we tried our plan -- and it worked. That's the difference."

Perhaps it isn't much of a surprise that a shadowy Super PAC has taken a quote completely out of context. But it takes a special level of audacity to do so in an ad in which you accuse the other side of "shameful, dishonest attacks."

Thanks for watching.