Politicians hate the word lie. When caught dissembling, they will concede that they misspoke, or misremembered, or even that they were economical with the truth.

Now Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, has added another entry to the lexicon of political euphemisms for the blatant fib.

When he said that as a boy he “saw” his father march with the civil rights leader Martin Luther King — a claim debunked yesterday — Mr Romney now says that he used the word “saw” as a figure of speech. Mr Romney said: “If you look at the literature, if you look at the dictionary, the term ‘saw’ includes ‘being aware of’ in the sense I’ve described. I did not see it with my own eyes, but I saw him in the sense of being aware of his participation in that great [civil rights] effort.”

Mr Romney, who seems to be having several “figure of speech” moments on the campaign trail, said in a key speech this month that he had watched his father George Romney, the late Michigan Governor, march with Martin Luther King. Mr Romney’s campaign cited a 1967 book, The Republican Establishment, which said that the senior Romney “has marched with Martin Luther King through the exclusive Grosse Pointe suburb [of Detroit]”.

But Mr Romney’s claim appeared unfounded after a veteran Michigan civil rights activist told a Detroit newspaper that George Romney never marched with Dr King in the city in 1963. When Mr Romney joined a demonstration in Grosse Pointe days later, Dr King was not there.

Confronted with this, Mitt Romney conceded that he had only heard of his father marching. He added that the statement that he “saw” his father march was akin to him stating, “I saw my dad become president of American Motors”. He told reporters: “I wasn’t there when he became president [of GM].”

Mr Romney, who is attempting to become America’s first Mormon president, released another contorted clarification after telling a talk show that he was endorsed by the National Rifle Association, the powerful gun lobby, when he ran for Governor of Massachusetts in 2002. The group endorsed no candidate. Mr Romney said on Monday: “It was, if you will, a support phone bank, which is not an official endorsement.”

Mr Romney’s Clintonesque explanations have so far not badly damaged his standing, although he recently lost his lead in Iowa and is tied with Rudy Giuliani at the top of the national polls. But his father’s explanation for why he supported the Vietnam War initially, when he ran for president in 1968, destroyed his campaign. Explaining his later opposition to the war, Mr Romney Sr said that he had been subjected to a “brainwashing” by US generals during a visit to Vietnam.

He was ridiculed for the statement and his presidential bid collapsed.

Tall tales

— Ronald Reagan told stories of his derring-do as a tail gunner in the Second World War — records showed that he had been refused active service because of poor eyesight. He did, however, play the part of a tail gunner in the 1942 film Desperate Journey

— The Democrat politician and former mayor of Atlantic City Bob Levy claimed that he had been a member of the Special Forces, even citing it in his 2005 campaign for mayor. In 2006 a newspaper report forced him to admit that it was untrue, and he resigned

— Seven months after Bill Clinton’s 1998 assertion, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms Lewinsky”, he was forced to acknowledge that he had “misled” the American public, but stopped short of calling it a lie, arguing that the semantics of “sexual relations” exclude oral sex

Source: Times database

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