The Whoppers of 2008 — The Sequel

Summary

The last five weeks have brought so many ads we feel like we’re drinking from a fire hose – and we’ll bet you’re pretty saturated, too.

Since our first “Whoppers of 2008” piece, we’ve seen some of the same themes repeated. McCain’s campaign doesn’t tire of distorting Obama’s tax plan, it seems, and in the process has whipped up at least 15 minutes of fame for sudden star Joe the Plumber. Obama continues trying to pull seniors into his camp by making deceptive claims about what McCain would do to Social Security, and he has new distortions about his opponent’s plans for Medicare.

And there are some fresh deceptions gobbling up airtime, including false depictions of McCain’s position on stem cell research, Obama’s connections to former Weatherman Bill Ayers and the community group ACORN, and both candidates’ health care plans. Then there’s a new parlor game, pin-the-blame-on-the-candidate for the financial crisis that has gripped the country.

For more on these and other mendacities and misrepresentations we’ve found recently, please read on to our Analysis section, where you’ll find summaries of many of our articles and links to the full-blown versions.

And if you haven’t voted already, do so by the end of Tuesday. After all, why do you think we’ve been doing all this work?

Analysis

Remember, these are just the recent clunkers. For a collection of those from earlier in the campaign, see our first installment, “The Whoppers of 2008.”

Since our last roundup of whoppers, Joe the Plumber has joined the cast, and Barack Obama’s “spread the wealth” comment to him has been made infamous by John McCain. In fact, in Obama’s exchange with Joe, he was simply talking about making the nation’s progressive tax system a bit more progressive by cutting taxes for most while raising them on top earners. McCain himself has defended progressive taxation in the past.

Also, McCain began denigrating Obama’s proposed refundable tax credits as “welfare.” But refundable tax credits are a key feature of McCain’s own health care plan, except that he calls them “reform.” In an early version of Obama’s plan, only a tiny portion of his tax credits would have gone to anyone who didn’t work, and advisers quickly announced that they had added a work requirement even for that one (a tax credit to benefit homeowners who don’t itemize deductions).

Two outside groups joined McCain in the tax attack. But one of them, Let Freedom Ring, pulled its ad off the air rather than defend its false assertion that Obama had voted to raise taxes on “100% of America.” An ad by another independent group, RightChange.com, says that Obama’s plan would hike taxes on “many small businesses” to 62 percent. That’s a ridiculously inflated figure that includes the state tax rate paid by people making more than $1 million annually in California.

Meanwhile, McCain has continued to broadcast, in speeches and ads, his most harped-upon deception of the campaign, telling voters that Obama favored higher taxes on “families making over $42,000 a year.” As we’ve said ad nauseam, Obama’s plan would raise taxes only on individuals making more than $200,000 a year, or couples or families making more than $250,000.

Obama’s ‘Welfare’ October 17

Right Change Is Wrong  October 24

Spread the Tax Hooey!  October 26

In two TV ads and in speeches, Team Obama made false claims aimed at frightening seniors into fleeing from McCain’s camp, to wit: McCain proposes to cut $882 billion out of Medicare benefits and eligibility to help pay for his health care plan. This turkey draws in part from a newspaper story saying McCain would pay for the health plan with “major reductions to Medicare and Medicaid.” The story said nothing about cutting benefits or eligibility, though, nor does it say the McCain camp has given a target number. One ad says benefits would be cut 22 percent, and there would be “higher premiums and co-pays.”

These claims have a de minimis relationship with reality, if that. The Obama camp borrowed calculations from a Democratic think tank that had piled detailed assumptions and calculations on top of a flat misrepresentation of what McCain’s economic adviser had said in the newspaper article. He was quoted as saying Medicare benefits would not be reduced, and reductions would come through “efficiencies.”

Obama’s False Medicare Claim  October 21

Obama: Celling McCain Short

Any ad that features the mom of a sick child is sure to pull a few heartstrings. But this radio spot is flat wrong when it says that “John McCain has stood in the way – he’s opposed stem cell research.” Technically, the carefully-worded phrase is correct: McCain has opposed embryonic stem cell research. But not since 2001, when he became convinced, he says, that the potential good it could do outweighed other considerations.

And although his vice presidential candidate feels otherwise, and the Republican Party platform doesn’t support his views either, McCain still opposes the Bush administration’s restrictions on stem-cell research. Our conclusion: The Obama-Biden ad seriously misstates McCain’s position.

Obama’s Stem Cell Spinning  September 30

In another attempt to paint groups and people with whom Obama has some connection in as unsavory a light as possible, McCain has gone after the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. And we’ve gone after him, for an ad accusing the group of “massive voter fraud” and for saying in the final presidential debate that ACORN is “now on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy.”

Both claims are breathtakingly inaccurate. There’s a huge difference between voter fraud and voter registration fraud. And while ACORN, which hires part-time, $8-an-hour canvassers to go door-to-door and register people to vote, has had widespread problems with phony registrations invented by employees who don’t want to work, the problem has never been that it sent people to the polls using bogus identities or to vote in any other fraudulent manner. Even the Republican prosecutor of the largest ACORN case to date said the shenanigans of ACORN workers were “not intended to permit illegal voting.”

To be sure, Obama’s interactions with the group have been greater than he has let on. But whether those ties can accurately be called “long and deep,” as McCain’s ad claims, is highly questionable.

ACORN Accusations  October 18

FactChecking Debate No. 3  October 16

Order in the Court, Please

Yes, ads in some state Supreme Court races have acquired the tone of some of the nastiest ads in the rest of the political realm. We found some attacks that didn’t hold up in Alabama, where two candidates are vying for an open seat on the bench.

One was in the form of a robo-call. It’s unclear who’s responsible for the effort, but the caller imparts false information when he says that Democrat Deborah Bell Paseur received a rating of “F” from the Alabama State Bar. It turns out that the bar doesn’t rate judicial candidates. For her part, Paseur said in an ad that her opponent, Greg Shaw, was “backed by more than a million dollars tied to gas and oil lobbyists” from a certain building “near Washington, D.C.” It may be true that the group that occupies the building, the Center for Individual Rights, has spent that much buying ads in support of Shaw. But Paseur can’t prove that all that money is connected to oil and gas lobbyists: the group doesn’t release the names of its contributors, and at any rate is involved in many issues, not just energy.

For our write-ups on even more viciously false ads in a Supreme Court campaign this year, see articles we wrote back in March about a race in Wisconsin.

Court Fight in the Heart of Dixie  October 23