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A Project of The Annenberg Public Policy Center

Person: Barack Obama

McCain’s Power Outage

June 20, 2008

Summary

McCain has spent the week focusing on energy policy, making some surprising, and inaccurate, statements.
Among them:

He said that ending a moratorium on offshore oil drilling "would be very helpful in the short term in resolving our energy crisis." But according to a government report, offshore oil wouldn’t have much of an impact on supply or prices until 2030. Update, June 24: At a town hall event on June 23, McCain didn’t claim that offshore drilling would lower prices in the short term,

Obama and European Affairs Subcommittee

June 20, 2008

Q: Does Obama chair a Senate subcommittee that oversees the war in Afghanistan?
A: He chairs the Senate’s Subcommittee on European Affairs, which has some oversight in Afghanistan through NATO.

Obama’s Lame Claim About McCain’s Money

June 20, 2008

Summary

Obama announced he would become the first presidential candidate since 1972 to rely totally on private donations for his general election campaign, opting out of the system of public financing and spending limits that was put in place after the Watergate scandal.
One reason, he said, is that "John McCain’s campaign and the Republican National Committee are fueled by contributions from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs."
We find that to be a large exaggeration and a lame excuse.

Obama’s Inflated Health ‘Savings’

June 16, 2008

Summary

Obama says his health care plan will garner large savings – $120 billion a year, or $2,500 per family – with more than half coming from the use of electronic health records. And he says he’ll make that happen in his first term. We find his statements to be overly optimistic, misleading and, to some extent, contradicted by one of his own advisers. And it masks the true cost of his plan to cover millions of Americans who now have no health insurance.

Obama’s Birth Certificate

June 16, 2008

Q: Has Obama’s birth certificate been disclosed?
A: Yes. His campaign made a copy public after speculation by conservative bloggers that he might not be a “natural-born citizen.”

McCain Votes with Bush?

June 13, 2008

Q: Is it true John McCain voted with George Bush 95 percent of the time?
A: Yes, it’s true, according to Congressional Quarterly’s assessment of McCain’s voting record.

Soft on Iran

June 5, 2008

Summary

John McCain is attacking Barack Obama’s opposition to the Kyl-Lieberman amendment, which (among other things) called for labeling Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization. McCain claims that Obama’s opposition means that he also opposed calling the IRGC terrorists. We find otherwise. 

Obama cosponsored an earlier bill that also called for designating the IRGC as a terrorist organization.
The Kyl-Lieberman amendment did more than just label the IRGC terrorists. Obama stated at the time that he opposed the bill on the grounds that it constituted "saber-rattling."

Clinton and the Popular Vote

June 5, 2008

Q: Did Clinton win the popular vote?
A: Obama won more votes unless you count Michigan, where he wasn’t on the ballot.

Obama’s ‘Dreams of My Father’

June 3, 2008

Q: Did Obama write that he would "stand with the Muslims" and that he nurses a "pervasive sense of grievance and animosity" toward whites?
A: No. A widely circulated e-mail fabricates some quotes from Obama’s books and twists others.