Birds on the Brain

Mitt Romney has done a heckuva job with his jobs plan.

At Tuesday night’s town-hall debate, the Republican presidential nominee replied with confidence when 20-year-old student Jeremy Epstein asked the candidates for reassurance that he’d be able to find work after graduation.

“I put out a five-point plan that gets America 12 million new jobs in four years,” Romney said. “It’s going to help Jeremy get a job when he comes out of school.”

The candidate’s statement, a version of a claim he has made for months on the stump and in a new ad, was bold, precise — and baseless.

Hours earlier, my Washington Post colleague Glenn Kessler had reported that the source the Romney campaign provided for the jobs figure was a trio of studies that either didn’t directly analyze Romney’s policies or were based on longer time horizons than four years.

Top Romney economist Glenn Hubbard acknowledged to Kessler that the three studies did “not make up the 12 million jobs in the first four years,” and the Romney campaign issued a statement minutes before the debate that expanded the jobs time frame to “the next four years and beyond.”

But the claim, though discredited, had become a key part of Romney’s message — and he went right ahead and repeated the falsehood during the debate.