Republican presidential debate: Fact check

Shortly before the passage of President Obama’s stimulus bill in 2009, Newt Gingrich’s political committee put out a video of Mr. Gingrich denouncing it as a “big politician, big bureaucracy, pork-laden bill.”


But at the same time, Mr. Gingrich was cheering a $19 billion part of the package that promoted the use of electronic health records, something that benefited clients of his consulting business. “I am delighted that President Obama has picked this as a key part of the stimulus package,” he told health care executives in a January 2009 conference call.


After the bill was passed a month later, Mr. Gingrich’s consultancy, the Center for Health Transformation, joined two of its clients, Allscripts and Microsoft, in an “Electronic Health Records Stimulus Tour” that traveled the country, encouraging doctors and hospitals to buy their products with the billions in new federal subsidies. “Get Engaged, Get Incentives,” one promotion read.


Bachmann repeatedly tried to raise doubts about Gingrich's conservative principles and accused him of being a Washington lobbyist for accepting up to $1.6 million in payments from troubled mortgage giant Freddie Mac, which was at the heart of America's housing crisis.


"We can't have as our nominee for the Republican Party someone who continues to stand for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. They need to be shut down, not built up," Bachmann said.


In a standoff over whether Gingrich in his congressional past had supported late-term abortion, Gingrich said Bachmann had her facts wrong.


Already, Gingrich is showing signs of fatigue among Republicans in this Midwestern state, an indication that they remain open to voting for someone else as a barrage of negative ads and verbal punches takes a toll on him.


A Public Policy Polling survey in Iowa this week said Gingrich's support had dropped several percentage points and he was leading Paul narrowly by 22 percent to 21 percent, with 16 percent for Romney and Michele Bachmann at 11 percent.


All told, Gingrich appeared to hold his own at the debate and Romney might have missed a chance to follow up on attacks he has been making against the former speaker in the media all week.


"I'm very concerned about not appearing to be zany," Gingrich said at one point, breezily making reference to a criticism of him this week by Romney.


ROMNEY: "I'm firmly in support of people not being discriminated against based upon their sexual orientation. At the same time, I oppose same-sex marriage. That's been my position from the beginning."


THE FACTS: In large measure, Romney has been consistent in those two positions, despite accusations of flip-flopping on gay rights.


He walked a fine line back in his failed 1994 Senate campaign, vowing to fight for equality but stopping short of endorsing gay marriage. That's the same line he walked Thursday night.


He has changed, though, on whether gay marriage should be addressed at the state or federal level. He has favored a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage at least since the beginning of his 2008 presidential bid, when he was the only major Republican candidate to do so. In 1994, he had said the matter should be decided by individual states. That was before the idea of a constitutional ban had gained traction in politics.


BACHMANN: "After the debates that we had last week, PolitiFact came out and said that everything I said was true."


For the second debate in a row, Gingrich complained that Bachmann wasn't getting her facts straight, this time when she went after him for the big money he made from Freddie Mac. In her own defense, Bachmann cited ratings from PolitiFact, a fact-checking organization that ranks statements on a scale from true to false, with the worst offender being "Pants on Fire" false.


PolitiFact rated two Bachmann statements from last week's debate. One, claiming Gingrich believed in an individual health care mandate as Massachusetts governor, was ranked mostly true. The other, that Romney introduced "socialized medicine" in his state, was judged burning-pants false.


Indeed, Bachmann has the worst record of accuracy in the Republican field, as rated by that organization and traced by others. Fully 73 percent of her statements checked by PolitiFact were judged mostly false or worse. Gingrich was wrong the next most often, 59 percent of the time.