Dear Romney Campaign, This Is How You Make a Venn Diagram

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The Internet offers some helpful infographic hints -- but with an edge.

romneyvenn.banner.jpg
Upworthy

On Tuesday, the Romney campaign tried, and failed, to create a Venn diagram. An infographic they distributed attacked President Obama's handling of health insurance, arguing that rising premiums showed he was hurting the middle class. As it happens, the message was misleading, for reasons explained by Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler in April. But it also wasn't really a Venn diagram. You see -- for those of you who were out that day in third grade -- a Venn diagram has two separate ideas with the overlap in the middle. Romney's chart just had a promise on one side, a reality on the other, and in the middle, the difference.

But while most of the Internet settled into its normal mode of mockery, Upworthy decided to be helpful, showing the Romney staff how a Venn diagram works. They weren't so kind in choice of source material -- they used policy stands on which Romney has, to use Barack Obama's term, evolved. They cited each of the flips, and you can see the citations here. (To be fair, Obama has had his own share of flips on some of these issues -- Drew Cline pointed out his change of heart on the individual mandate in this space last week.) Got it now, guys?

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David A. Graham

David Graham is an associate editor at The Atlantic, where he oversees the Politics Channel. He previously reported for Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, and The National.

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