The mendacity of hope: What we want to believe about Obama
By Richard Cohen | Tuesday, January 1, 2008 | The Washington Post
“…John Edwards lied about the cost of his haircuts. Fred Thompson lied about lobbying for a pro-choice outfit. John McCain insists that the United States was founded as a “Christian nation.” Mitt Romney concocted the story about how his father marched with Martin Luther King Jr. And Rudy Giuliani is a one-man fib machine — everything from why he had to provide police protection for his then-mistress to the survivability rates for prostate cancer in Britain. Yet it is something Barack Obama said that bothers me most of all because Obama is a new kind of politician. He is supposed to be coolly authentic.
What concerns me is the lie or fib or misstatement — call it what you want — involved in Obama’s assertion that more young black men are in prison than in college. It is a shocking statistic — and it is wrong. But when The Post’s lonesome but formidable truth squad, Michael Dobbs, brought this to the attention of the Obama campaign, he not only got the brushoff but the assertion was later repeated….”…BS
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/31/AR2007123101662_pf.html
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One Response to “The mendacity of hope: What we want to believe about Obama”
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This is now the third major gaffe that Obama has had in as many months. The first was his (incorrect) comments about social security (which Paul Krugman called “taking a page from the G.O.P. playbook”). The second was some comments he made about the economic crisis re the “subprime scandal” (which Krugman smply called “completely wrong”). And now he makes a statement that is easily refuted by a simple Wikipedia search.
Obama should never have run this time around; despite his claims to the contrary, he did not understand what was involved in a presidential campaign, and he simply does not have the…experience, as noted by these and other gaffes.
Had he waited eight years, he would almost certainly have been a shoo-in in 2016 as the first black president.
Peace.
Posted on 01-Jan-08 at 2:09 pm | Permalink