Of all the nutty rumors, baseless conspiracy theories and sheer disinformation that we’ve dealt with at FactCheck.org during campaign 2008, perhaps the goofiest is the claim that Barack Obama is not a “natural-born citizen” and therefore not eligible to be president under the constitution.
This claim was first advanced by diehard Hillary Clinton supporters as her campaign for the party’s nomination faded, and has enjoyed a revival among John McCain’s partisans as he fell substantially behind Obama in public opinion polls.
Person: Barack Obama
Making Ends Meet
Sen. Barack Obama has said several times that he has proposed cuts that pay for “every dime” of his spending proposals, a claim we’ve called “misleading.” The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center’s analysis, for one, found that “without substantial cuts in government spending” Obama’s plan – and McCain’s, too – “would substantially increase the national debt over the next ten years.”
Obama repeated his claim in his half-hour commercial that aired Wednesday night on major networks and cable television,
Obama Soft on Crime?
With a handful of days to go before Election Day, the Republican Federal Committee of Pennsylvania is going after Sen. Barack Obama with a mailer that claims the presidential nominee has “a record of being soft on crime.” Luckily, our fellow fact-checkers at PolitiFact.com are all over this one. According to PolitiFact, the mailer (also being distributed in Florida) “cherry-picks a few choice examples and conveniently ignores evidence that contradicts its conclusions.”
For example, the mailer says that Obama is “against tougher penalties for street gangs,”
Reckless Driving
The Obama-Biden campaign has released an ad as part of its “closing argument” to the American people. But we have a few factual objections to raise.
The ad is called “Rearview Mirror” and says that if you “wonder where John McCain would take the economy” just “look behind you,” alluding to the Bush administration. The ad even pictures President Bush’s face in the rearview mirror of a car.
But it touts some misleading claims Obama has dropped along the long campaign trail.
Same Old Claims in Another Language
Summary
The presidential campaigns and third-party groups have been bilingual throughout the election, targeting Spanish-speaking voters with some misleading and false ads. Among the recent TV spots:
A McCain-Palin ad tries to paint Obama as a "riesgo" (risk), falsely claiming that his health care plan would require small businesses to cover their employees. But Obama’s plan explicitly exempts small businesses from this requirement, and an adviser has said the threshold "would almost certainly be higher than ten"
A License to Kill
Summary
An upstart group calling itself the "National Republican Trust PAC" mixes a pile of false claims and the image of 9/11 mastermind Mohammed Atta to create one of the sleaziest false TV ads of the campaign.
The spot falsely claims Obama has a "plan" to issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. In fact, Obama has said quite specifically, "I am not proposing that that’s what we do."
The ad implies such licenses would enable terrorist attacks.
‘Unethical?’
Summary
An ad released jointly by the McCain-Palin campaign and the RNC claims Obama "rewards his friends with your tax dollars" and calls his actions "unethical." Some of what the ad says is false or misleading. Here are the facts:
The ad claims that Obama supporter and Chicago real estate developer Allison Davis received $20 million in taxpayer money. That’s false. Davis didn’t get this money. Instead, the federal grant went to the Chicago Housing Authority,
Berg Gets Sunk
Readers have been champing at the bit to know our view of the lawsuit brought against Obama by a Philadelphia Hillary supporter, which alleges that the candidate is not a natural-born U.S. citizen. (We know —this again?) Of course only a judge is qualified to legally determine the validity of a suit, so we’ve held off on opining, though we’ve certainly put forth our findings on various aspects of the claim. But we stress that there are no such qualification requirements to bring a suit.
A Little Ditty ‘Bout Taxes and Trade
The Obama-Biden campaign has released a radio ad in Indiana featuring favorite native son John Mellencamp. In the ad, Mellencamp says, “John McCain will keep giving tax breaks to companies shipping American jobs overseas.”
Mellencamp is referring to an aspect of the tax code that allows companies to skirt paying U.S. corporate taxes on profits they make overseas and leave overseas. But economists have consistently said this tax provision isn’t a major reason jobs are being sent abroad.
Right Change Is Wrong
Summary
A conservative group called RightChange.com has spent $3 million running ads that largely criticize Obama and his tax plans. They’re false:
Two ads say Obama would tax "small businesses" at a rate of "62 percent." He wouldn’t. That number is an inflated estimate of the very top tax rate, and it doesn’t represent what Obama has proposed.
That false figure includes an increased Social Security tax rate that Obama doesn’t support, plus the state income tax rate paid by people making more than a million dollars a year in California.