Tipsheet

Some More "Inartful" Obama Representations

FactCheck over at Newsweek magazine (which has served consistently as a devoted Obama cheerleader) looks into some of the assertions Barack has made in his campaign ads, and finds little substantiation for two claims in his ad "Dignity."

First, he didn't "work his way through college and Harvard Law" -- he had loans, as many other students do (and frankly, at law school, there wouldn't have been time to hold an outside job while working on the Review).  The campaign justifies the claim by mentioning that Barack had two summer jobs.  Well, if that's the basis -- I "worked my way" through college and Harvard Law, too.

Second, it's "going too far," as Newsweek puts it, for him to claim that he created a law that moved people from welfare to work.  Rather, he was one of five sponsors of a follow-up law to the federal welfare reform legislation that the Republican Congress created and Bill Clinton signed (urged by Dick Morris).

Interestingly, the piece gives him a pass for having asserted that he passed "tax cuts for workers" even though he wasn't even an original sponsor of the legislation.  That's because, according to the piece, he "let Republicans . . . take the lead on it."  Hm -- and they wouldn't even let him come on board as a sponsor?  Sounds strange to me.  Let's hope Newsweek corrects the broken link to the AP account that's the basis for that conclusion.

These kinds of misrepresentations don't seem to smack much of the "new kind of politics," do they?