Utah Free Press

Fact Checking Obama

By Richard Okelberry (Note: This Essay was originally published at KVNU’s, For the People Blog.)

Almost immediately after Obama’s speech last night before Congress, MSNBC of all places put out a rather in depth scrutiny of some of the claims Obama made during his speech.

Fact check: Obama glosses over some realities

In delivering his to-do list, the president’s assertions deserve scrutiny

(abridged)

• “OBAMA: “We have launched a housing plan that will help responsible families facing the threat of foreclosure lower their monthly payments and refinance their mortgages. It’s a plan that won’t help speculators or that neighbor down the street who bought a house he could never hope to afford, but it will help millions of Americans who are struggling with declining home values.”
• THE FACTS: If the administration has come up with a way to ensure money does not go to home buyers who used bad judgment, it hasn’t announced it.
•  
• OBAMA: “We have already identified $2 trillion in savings over the next decade.”
• THE FACTS: Although 10-year projections are common in government, they don’t mean much. And at times, they are a way for a president to pass on the most painful steps to his successor, by putting off big tax increases or spending cuts until someone else is in the White House.
•  
• OBAMA: “Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market. People bought homes they knew they couldn’t afford from banks and lenders who pushed those bad loans anyway. And all the while, critical debates and difficult decisions were put off for some other time on some other day.”
• THE FACTS: This may be so, but it isn’t only Republicans who pushed for deregulation of the financial industries. The Clinton administration championed an easing of banking regulations, including legislation that ended the barrier between regular banks and Wall Street banks. That led to a deregulation that kept regular banks under tight federal regulation but extended lax regulation of Wall Street banks. Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, later an economic adviser to candidate Obama, was in the forefront in pushing for this deregulation.
•  
• OBAMA: “In this budget, we will end education programs that don’t work and end direct payments to large agribusinesses that don’t need them. We’ll eliminate the no-bid contracts that have wasted billions in Iraq, and reform our defense budget so that we’re not paying for Cold War-era weapons systems we don’t use. We will root out the waste, fraud and abuse in our Medicare program that doesn’t make our seniors any healthier, and we will restore a sense of fairness and balance to our tax code by finally ending the tax breaks for corporations that ship our jobs overseas.”
• THE FACTS: First, his budget does not accomplish any of that. It only proposes those steps. That’s all a president can do, because control over spending rests with Congress. Obama’s proposals here are a wish list and some items, including corporate tax increases and cuts in agricultural aid, will be a tough sale in Congress.
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• OBAMA: “In the last eight years, (health insurance) premiums have grown four times faster than wages. And in each of these years, 1 million more Americans have lost their health insurance”
• THE FACTS: The number of uninsured grew by 7 million from 2000 to 2007, the latest year for which Census figures are available, meaning Obama’s claim would be true if had been talking about averages. But it’s not true that the number of uninsured rose each year by 1 million. In 2007, the ranks of the uninsured dropped by 1.3 million from the year before, to 45.7 million.
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• OBAMA: “Thanks to our recovery plan, we will double this nation’s supply of renewable energy in the next three years.”
• THE FACTS: While the president’s stimulus package includes billions in aids for renewable energy and conservation, his goal is unlikely to be achieved through the recovery plan alone.
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• OBAMA: “Over the next two years, this plan will save or create 3.5 million jobs.”
• THE FACTS: This is a recurrent Obama formulation. But job creation projections are uncertain even in stable times, and some of the economists relied on by Obama in making his forecast acknowledge a great deal of uncertainty in their numbers.
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• OBAMA: “And I believe the nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it.”
• THE FACTS: According to the Library of Congress, the inventor of the first true automobile was probably Germany’s Karl Benz, who created the first auto powered by an internal combustion gasoline, in 1885 or 1886. Nobody disputes that Henry Ford created the first assembly line that made cars affordable.

(Fact check: Obama glosses over some realities: In delivering his to-do list, the president’s assertions deserve scrutiny)

It sure is beginning to sound a lot like Bushmas!  It seems that we have another president in the white house that likes to play stretch Armstrong with the truth.

3 comments to Fact Checking Obama

• Jason Williams

February 25th, 2009 at 12:58 pm ·

Shorter Okelberry: “Ha! His socks don’t match! He’s just as bad as Bush!”

Just have to give you a hard time, Rich. You know I always appreciate your POV. I think it’s important to realize that no matter how excited you get about a candidate (or in my case, a candidate’s campaign), they aren’t going to be perfect (FISA!), and constant pressure needs be applied to get them to go where we want, and to keep them honest.

• Richard Okelberry

February 25th, 2009 at 1:41 pm ·

Jason,

I agree completely. To be honest, I was surprised to see such an assessment come from MSNBC. Also, I don’t care much for such nitpicking. I just can’t help pointing out to those who were either die hard supporters of Bush or those that absolutely love Obama that this is how politics is played in the real world.

In the real world, politicians make exaggerations and stretch slash embellish the truth. Does it make it right? No… Is it completely wrong? Not really… It’s just the nature of the beast. Though you must admit, while every challenging candidate plays the ‘Change’ card, the fact that Obama made it a catch phrase will always make him vulnerable to caparisons to predecessors. I could have just as easily compared Obama to Clinton, Bush Sr. or even Reagan and been just as accurate. But after years of liberals complaining about Bush’s tendency to do what Obama did last night, I couldn’t help myself.