Mitt Romney can finally say he won.
President of the United States still remains out of his reach, but he has won PolitiFact's 2012 "Lie of the Year" Award.
The political fact-checking site gives out the award each year for the largest or most egregious fabrication made by a politician or candidate.
Romney won for his assertion that Obama had "sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China."
PolitiFact rated the statement and the insistence that followed a "Pants on Fire" lie. Washngton Post fact-checkers gave it four "Pinocchios."
The debacle began in late October, in the waning days of the presidential campaign.
A conservative blogger misread an article from Bloomberg News which said Jeep was planning on expanding in the Chinese market and would open new plants there, common practice in the industry because it saves on transportation costs.
The blogger claimed that Jeep was shutting down its U.S. production facilities and moving them to China. The Drudge Report picked it up.
Chrysler quickly released a statement saying the assertion was false, fearing that patriotic Americans would refrain from buying Jeeps because they thought they were made overseas.
Gualberto Ranieri responded on Chrysler's company blog.
"Let's set the record straight: Jeep has no intention of shifting production of its Jeep models out of North America to China," said Gualberto Ranieri.
"A careful and unbiased reading of the Bloomberg take would have saved unnecessary fantasies and extravagant comments," he said.
But Romney repeated the claim at a campaign rally that night, and then his staffers turned it into a campaign ad, despite the protestations of Chrysler, independent fact-checkers, Democrats and pundits.
That prompted the CEO of Chrysler to respond.
The entire incident, far from giving Romney ammunition to use against Obama in the last days of his presidential run, had the complete opposite effect.
The Obama campaign got to point out that not only was Romney wrong, but that Chrysler and the Americans it employed had been saved by the president's bailout of the auto industry, a move that Romney had famously opposed in a prominent New York Times editorial entitled "Let Detroit Go Bankrupt."
And many of those automobile industry employees live in Rust Belt swing states like Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, which all went for Obama during the election in November.
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