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Fact check: Rivals' ads low on truth

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Go to the url below and you can see the ads--if
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By Jill Lawrence

WASHINGTON — Cut through the din of this
presidential campaign and you will find
something new this year besides the usual
record spending: candidate ads divorced from
facts, and a platoon of fact checkers trying to
keep up.

Veteran campaign watchers say they have never
seen ads quite like some from Republican John
McCain. The spots contend that Democrat Barack
Obama caused high gasoline prices, called
McCain running mate Sarah Palin a pig, plans to
raise taxes on the middle class and — in an ad
called Education that's emblematic of the trend
— wants to teach graphic sex to kindergartners.
All the claims are false.

Education "is a terribly misleading ad,
designed to deceive voters," says Brooks
Jackson, director of the non-partisan
Factcheck.org.

Obama, of course, is running plenty of his own
negative ads. In a reversal of earlier weeks,
the Wisconsin Advertising Project says he aired
more of them than McCain in the week following
the GOP convention, 77%-56%.

Some of Obama's assertions have drawn censure,
such as that McCain favors a 100-year war in
Iraq (McCain was talking about a peacetime
presence) or has plans that would halve Social
Security benefits ("a gross distortion," The
Washington Post said Monday).

So far, several analysts say, most of Obama's
ads mislead and misrepresent in familiar ways —
twisting a statistic or a snippet of video to
make a questionable point, for instance. They
say McCain has been in a different league,
epitomized by Education.

"McCain is making no effort to be truthful,"
says Farhad Manjoo, author of True Enough:
Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society.
"The lies aren't routine political lies where
they stretch the truth of what a candidate
might have said, or take a candidate out of
context."

PolitiFact.com, a fact-check team from the St.
Petersburg (Fla.) Times and Congressional
Quarterly, rates 22 statements and ads from
McCain as barely true, 23 as false and six as
"pants on fire" (absurdly, ridiculously false)
out of 117 analyzed. For Obama, the score is 14
barely true, 18 false and one "pants on fire"
out of 120 analyzed.

Anatomy of an ad

Education is the ad that has come to
crystallize the difference between 2008 and
earlier years.

McCain's campaign says the spot was a response
to What Kind?— a Sept. 9 Obama ad that said:
"John McCain voted to cut education funding,
against accountability standards. He even
proposed abolishing the Department of
Education. And John McCain's economic plan
gives $200 billion more to special interests
while taking money away from public schools."

Education Week's Alyson Klein called
What Kind? misleading on accountability
and arguably fair on school funds.

But McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds says the
funding charge was offensive and unsupported.
He says he tracked it to a National Education
Association study "based on our proposals to
freeze discretionary spending, ignoring the
fact that John McCain had pledged to fully fund
the No Child Left Behind Act. It was a blatant
falsehood. It was a lie."

McCain struck back later that day with
Education. It proved to be a tipping
point. Reporters, columnists, editorial writers
and watchdog groups produced fact checks
pronouncing it beyond the pale even by the
elastic standards of political advertising.

"It was a remarkable ad because it was wrong in
so many ways," says PolitiFact.com editor Bill
Adair. Its rating was a mix of "barely true"
and "pants on fire."

The script: "Education Week says Obama
'hasn't made a significant mark on education.'
That he's 'elusive' on accountability. A
'staunch defender of the existing public school
monopoly.' Obama's one accomplishment?
Legislation to teach 'comprehensive sex
education' to kindergartners. Learning about
sex before learning to read? Barack Obama.
Wrong on education. Wrong for your family."

Only the first quote is from Education
Week. It's accurate, but the paper also
praised Obama's work on teacher quality and
early childhood education and said McCain
didn't have much of an education record either.

Furthermore, Obama did not sponsor or co-
sponsor the 2003 bill, and it was never
enacted.

Bounds declined to discuss the ad or make the
McCain ad team available. GOP media consultant
Alex Castellanos, who did not make the ad but
is familiar with it, says the bill lowered the
age for sexual education from sixth-grade to
kindergarten. "McCain was right about sex ed
before learning to read. That was true. Obama
voted for sex ed" in kindergarten, he says.

But did Obama vote for "comprehensive sex
education" in kindergarten? The bill repeatedly
said instruction should be age-appropriate,
with parents able to pull their kids out if
desired.

The sponsor of the bill, retired state senator
Carol Ronen, did not return a call for comment.

Pam Sutherland, a legislative expert at the
Illinois Planned Parenthood Council, says
proponents made clear in hearings that age-
appropriate for grades K-3 meant teaching kids
about bad touching, so they could protect
themselves against predators. "That's what is
generally taught" at that age, she says. That's
also how Obama described the bill in 2004.

On ABC's The View, Joy Behar said to McCain,
"We know these ads are lies. But you say 'I
approve these messages.' Do you really approve
them?"

"Actually, they are not lies," McCain
responded.

For all the ruckus, Education ran only
36 times in smaller markets, mostly on one day
— Sept. 10. Total outlay by the McCain
campaign: Slightly more than $30,000, according
to the Campaign Media Analysis Group.

In that, it was typical of many ads this year —
Web-only or barely run. CMAG ad tracker Evan
Tracey calls such ads "tomatoes for food-fight
TV" and the blogosphere. Like Education, he
says, an Obama ad depicting McCain as a relic
who doesn't use e-mail "almost never aired."

A bad year for accuracy

Darrell West, author of Air Wars: Television
Advertising in Election Campaigns, says
2008 is shaping up as "much worse in terms of
factual inaccuracy" than the heavily negative
years of 1964 and 1988.

That's even including the provocative Willie
Horton ad an independent conservative group ran
against Democrat Michael Dukakis 20 years ago.
"There was a case of this convicted felon who,
while out on furlough, did terrible deeds,"
West says. "Although the ad was racially
tinged, it was factually accurate."

This year he says "McCain has been a much worse
violator of the facts than Obama has been.
There are statements that can be disproven that
still are appearing … in paid advertisements."

McCain ads on Obama's tax plan are a case in
point. Factcheck.org has scored McCain for
"multiple false and misleading claims" about
the plan, citing studies that show families
making under $250,000 would fare better with
Obama. The group says McCain is engaged in a
months-long "pattern of misrepresentation,"
most recently with a new ad late last week.

McCain also has the distinction of misusing
Factcheck itself in an ad. "Those attacks on
Palin that we debunked didn't come from Obama,"
the group protested.

Obama is edging into McCain territory, Manjoo
and others say, with a new Spanish-language ad
that suggests McCain is hostile to immigrants,
ties him to offensive remarks from Rush
Limbaugh and quotes Limbaugh out of context to
boot.

"There goes Barack Obama, down into the
deceptive-campaign-ad gutter with John McCain,"
The New York Times editorialized Friday. The ad
earned Obama his first "pants on fire" rating
from PolitiFact.

Doug Bailey, a retired Republican admaker who
founded the political tipsheet Hotline, says
outside groups did the dirty work in past
elections. "Now you have the candidates
authorizing ads run by the campaigns themselves
which are just blatantly false," he says. Fact
checking is important, he says, but may not be
able to compete with the ads.

Manjoo argues in his book that partisan blogs,
websites and cable shows keep people in their
comfort zones and make it easier for
politicians to lie. "We'll see in this election
whether fact checking or lying wins out," he
says. "If McCain does well with these types of
ads, it will give people license to do this in
the future."

— Jill Lawrence
USA Today
2008-09-22
http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-09-22-ads_N.htm

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