Get ready for 60 more days of half-truths, misstatements, overstatements and sometimes flat-out fibs leading to Election Day.

In a back-to-back preview of what’s to come, Democrats stretched the truth at their national convention in Charlotte, N.C., last week, just as Republicans did at their gathering the week before in Tampa, Fla.

There’s little that can stop it. If Democrats and Republicans don’t have much in common politically these days, they do share an open disdain for truth-squad results that don’t go their way.

Republicans and conservatives, riled by blistering assessments of the veracity of vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s convention speech, howled that media fact checkers are nothing more than liberal toadies of the Democratic Party. Democrats also have waged war on fact checkers. President Barack Obama’s campaign complained to the independent group FactCheck.org after it said Obama unfairly blamed Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for the actions of Bain Capital, the company Romney co-founded, after he left the business in 1998.

“We have blowback from everyone we critique,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, the director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, which oversees FactCheck.org. “It’s business as usual and we just accept it.”

At the Democratic convention, several speakers took liberties with facts, from claims about Romney’s tenure as the governor of Massachusetts to the impact of Republican plans for Medicare and Pell Grants.

Here’s a look at the rhetoric and the reality:

Democrats

President Barack Obama: “We can help big factories and small businesses double their exports, and if we choose this path, we can create a million new manufacturing jobs in the next four years.”

The facts: Obama has claimed an increase of some 500,000 manufacturing jobs over the past 29 months. But this is cherry picking by the president. From the beginning of Obama’s term 31⁄2 years ago, manufacturing jobs have declined by more than 500,000, according to the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. Manufacturing jobs have been on a steady decline for nearly two decades.

Even though there has been a modest uptick in manufacturing jobs this year, unless there is a major turnaround, it seems unlikely that Obama’s goal of 1 million new manufacturing jobs can be reached by his target date of 2016.



Obama: “Millions of students are paying less for college today because we finally took on a system that wasted billions of taxpayer dollars on banks and lenders.”

The facts: “Technically it is true,” said Bryan Cook, director of the Center for Policy Analysis at the American Council on Education. “How much of a savings is not clear.”

Large increases in federal Pell Grants, GI Bill benefits and the 2009 American Opportunity Tax Credit led to a significant increase in the amount of aid provided to students who qualify for these benefits. The current per year maximum Pell Grant is $5,550 — $900 higher than it was in 2008 for a program that serves more than 9 million students.

Under the Obama administration, Congress passed legislation requiring all federal loans be issued through the Education Department; previously, they were also issued by private lenders. This will also probably mean students pay less in the long term.



Vice President Joe Biden: “After the worst job loss since the Great Depression, we’ve created 4.5 million private sector jobs in the past 29 months.”

The facts: This seems to be a favorite statistic, because many speakers at the convention cited it. But it’s misleading — a figure that counts jobs from when the recession reached its trough and employment began to grow again. It excludes jobs lost earlier in Obama’s term, and masks the fact that joblessness overall has risen over Obama’s term so far.

As well, in the same 29 months that private sector jobs grew by 4.5 million, jobs in the public sector declined by about 500,000, making the net gain in that period about 4 million.

Overall, some 7.5 million jobs were lost during the recession that began in December 2007 in President George W. Bush’s term and ended officially in June 2009 with Obama as president.

Never since World War II has the economy been so slow to recover all the jobs lost in a downturn.



Republicans

Former Gov. Mitt Romney: “His (Obama’s) trillion dollar cuts to our military will eliminate hundreds of thousands of jobs, and also put our security at greater risk.”

The facts: If Republicans and Democrats can’t reach a budget agreement by year’s end, a series of automatic cuts would be triggered and beginning in 2013 there would be widespread cuts to government programs that would hit the Pentagon especially hard. But these automatic cuts — called a sequester — are the result of a bipartisan agreement that Romney’s running mate, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, helped steer through Congress last year. Romney and Ryan have both vowed to insulate the Pentagon from these cuts if elected. And they’ve both lately been calling them Obama’s cuts — even though they’re not exclusively Obama’s doing.



Romney: “I have a plan to create 12 million new jobs. It has five steps.”

The facts: No one says he can’t, but economic forecasters are divided on his ability to deliver. He’d have to nearly double the anemic pace of job growth lately.

That’s conceivable in a healthy economy. Moody’s Analytics, one financial research operation, expects nearly that many jobs to return over the next four years no matter who occupies the White House, provided there are no further economic bumps. Other analysts have questioned Romney’s rosy job promises.

Romney’s steps include deficit cuts that he has not spelled out, and a march toward energy independence that past presidents have promised but not delivered. Unlike Obama, he does not support curbs on demand; namely the much higher mileage standards that are coming into effect. Romney proposes boosting supplies, with freer access to development of oil, gas, coal and more. Independent energy analysts say supply and demand both have to be in the equation for energy independence to be achieved.



Vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan: “The stimulus was a case of political patronage, corporate welfare and cronyism at their worst. You, the working men and women of this country, were cut out of the deal.”

The facts: Ryan himself asked for stimulus funds shortly after Congress approved the $800 billion plan, known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Ryan’s pleas to federal agencies included letters to Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Labor Secretary Hilda Solis seeking stimulus grant money for two Wisconsin energy conservation companies.

One of them, the nonprofit Wisconsin Energy Conservation Corp., received $20.3 million from the Energy Department to help homes and businesses improve energy efficiency, according to federal records. That company, he said in his letter, would build “sustainable demand for green jobs.” Another eventual recipient, the Energy Center of Wisconsin, received about $365,000.