For a candidate who says he is different kind of politician, Obama is looking pretty predictable. Go to Florida and tell retirees the other guy is going to take away your Social Security. Common tactic.
According to Factcheck.org as reproduced in Newsweek, Obama’s claim about John McCain and Social Security is just plain false. Check it out:
In Daytona Beach, Obama said that “if my opponent had his way, the millions of Floridians who rely on it would’ve had their Social Security tied up in the stock market this week.” He referred to “elderly women” at risk of poverty, and said families would be scrambling to support “grandmothers and grandfathers.”
That’s not true. The plan proposed by President Bush and supported by McCain in 2005 would not have allowed anyone born before 1950 to invest any part of their Social Security taxes in private accounts. All current retirees would be covered by the same benefits they are now.
and then…
In our “Scaring Seniors” article posted Sept. 19 we took apart a claim in an Obama-Biden ad that McCain somehow supported a 50 percent cut in Social Security benefits, which is simply false. Then, on Saturday Sept. 20, Sen. Barack Obama personally fed senior citizens another whopper, this one a highly distorted claim about the private Social Security accounts that McCain supports.
Factcheck has some ink on McCain’s claims as well so they are pretty objective it seems. How many days until the election?
I am not sure what is most amazing, Obama’s claims or his campaign worker’s tortured effort to defend it.
While fact check may be objective Warren, you clearly are not. Obama and McCain are politicians. They both play the same political games of negative campaigning and dissembling. And they do it because that is what wins elections. This fact is more a sad commentary on the american populace than it is on either of them .
And frankly Warren, your willingness to jump on any faults of the Obama campaign while ignoring the same faults in the McCain campaign is a commentary on your own biases and willingness to have an honest discussion of the candidates.
As I already posted in your comments here, if we’re really looking to places like factcheck and politifact to tell us which campaign is being more truthful overall, the winner isn’t the McCain campaign, and in fact it isn’t even close.
Of course, what the articles you link to also say is that it is true the Bush plan McCain supported would cut benefits over time by ~30%, and that Obama’s claims about benefits being at the risk of the market would be true for future retirees in a hypothetical future where the Bush plan had passed. It’s unfortunate the Obama campaign felt they needed to go one step further than the truth, since I think for their audiences the truth would be horrifying enough.
Factcheck.org is pretty objective. They have several pieces talking about misrepresentation not only by McCain, but by Palin as well.