Obama Fudges in New Ads

Non-partisan web-site FactCheck.org nailed the Obama campaign twice this week for misleading ads. The first contains a deceptive picture and a misleading claim about McCain's tax policy.

An Obama ad features video of McCain walking toward the camera with a group of people in power suits, as the narrator says, "the lobbyists, running his low road campaign." None of the people pictured are lobbyists, however.

The ad also repeats a misleading claim that McCain favors "billions in tax breaks for big oil and drug companies." But McCain's tax policy doesn't target those industries. He calls for lowering the corporate tax rate for all companies.

The second claims the McCain shares blame for a DHL merger that cost Ohio 8,000 jobs.

The ads charge that McCain opposition to a 2003 amendment helped DHL and amounted to turning his back on workers. That's misleading. McCain said he opposed a version of the amendment because it was a special project inserted into an unrelated bill, not to help DHL. And the Teamsters union praised the merger at the time, saying that it would lead to more jobs. And at first, more jobs indeed followed.

The ads also imply that the DHL merger is a direct cause of the job losses in Ohio, which we find to be both unlikely and unsubstantiated. Airborne Express had laid off 2,000 employees before the merger, and analysts at the time said that the struggling carrier would need to make expensive investments in its international infrastructure to remain competitive.

Our unofficial running tally of false or misleading campaign rhetoric now stands at 16 for McCain and 8 for Obama, according to FactCheck. McCain has been more dishonest than Obama in his campaign statements according to Politifact.com as well.