What Obama Got Wrong

It may seem like a small point, but is it? In "The Mendacity of Hope: What We Want to Believe About Obama" Richard Cohen talks about politicians and lies. I have long believed that our political system is structured in a way that it almost forces our politicians to lie to us.

Given that it's next to impossible to please 'all the people all the time,' a candidate tries their best to please as many people as possible in order to win. If they don't play the game, we hardly give them a second look (read Dennis Kucinich).

But what about a politician who does try and separate themselves from the crowd? Who does claim to be a true agent of change? Cohen writes:

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.

You can appreciate the usefulness of this false claim. It says something compelling about the plight of young, black males that is essentially true -- their condition amounts to a calamity and something has to be done. But this particular comparison is wrong, and Obama must know it by now. Ought to be true is not the same as true.

The New York Times reported in September 2007:

In 2003, according to Justice Department figures, 193,000 black college-age men were in prison. While 132,000 black college-age men were living on campus, an additional 400,000 or so were attending college but living someplace else.

Michael Dobbs, of the Washington Post 'truth-squad' wrote:

WHAT HE GOT WRONG: "I don't want to wake up four years from now and discover that we still have more young black men in prison than in college."

-- Barack Obama, rally in Harlem, Nov. 29

Obama has repeated this false claim to predominantly African American audiences, even after The Washington Post pointed out the mistake to his campaign. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 106,000 African American men ages 18 to 24 were in federal or state prisons at the end of 2005. An additional 87,000 were temporarily held in local jails in mid-2006. According to 2005 census data, 530,000 African American men in this age group were in college.

Black male college students outnumber black male prisoners even if the age group is expanded to 30 or 35. The Obama campaign has not responded to several requests for statistical data to support the senator's remarks, and it has not explained a similar claim that he made to an NAACP audience on July 12.

So is it a small item to be overlooked? Wait, there's more.

In a provocative recent essay for the New Republic's Web site, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz coined the phrase "the delusional style in American punditry." He applied it to Obama's fans in the American press. His argument is that certain journalists are so enthralled by the sheer Obama-ness of Obama that they are willing to overlook everything they know about the fundamental value of experience.
In this regard, Wilentz cites a Boston Globe editorial that used Obama's memoir, "Dreams From My Father," to extol Obama's real-life experiences. Wilentz is not persuaded. To him, the book is "not exactly a portrait of sterling honesty or authenticity."

I and others have written that Obama -- as he himself says in the introduction to this book -- invented composite characters and altered chronology. But as the Chicago Tribune also reported, some of the events Obama passionately details seem not to have happened at all. Maybe his memory played tricks on him. Mine sure does.

But I am not running for president. And if I were, I'd pay particular attention to the truth -- to the nagging facts that sometimes get in the way of a good story. After all, it is not only Iraq that has been destroyed in the past several years -- so has whatever trust the American people still had in their government. I have been at this game a long time, but for sheer manipulation of the facts, for a fudging of the truth, for the occasional bald lie, the Bush administration takes the cake. Cheney and truth cannot be found in the same sentence. [...]

I am a bit enamored with Obama as well. But the man's public record is thin and the glow from him is distracting and my intuition tells me that sometimes intuition is no substitute for experience. So, I'll sit back and watch some more -- and wait to see if Obama or anyone in his campaign calls back Dobbs and corrects the record. "Facts are stubborn things," John Adams once said. So, to our regret, we keep learning the hard way.

We are hours away from the first caucus and just days away from the first primary. Hopefully someone from the Obama camp will set the record straight.

Do we force candidates to lie to us in order to get elected? Are we willing to overlook those lies if they are from someone we really like? What do you think?