OBAMA'S NEW AD, A ROSETTA STONE OF HALF TRUTHS

Obama's TV Ads are getting better. In the first Ad Produced by the Obama Campaign the Senator lied, taking credit for passing a bill that he wasn't even there to vote on. This latest one doesn't have the blatant lies, but is described by Jim Geraghty in his Campaign Spot Blog as the Rosetta Stone of Half-Truths (see the video of the ad above). Again he overstates his role in both legislative action and community organizer:

In the Washington Post Howard Kurtz Said:

The key image here is the last one: Barack Obama throwing his arm around one of several older female workers in hairnets and aprons. The picture conveys the message that the Illinois senator cares about working-class folks and, in particular, the demographic he had little success with in the primaries, women over 50.

The commercial, like an earlier biographical ad, is designed to neutralize perceptions of Obama as an Ivy League elitist by playing up his background as a Chicago community organizer.

Obama did, however, work as a New York financial consultant before that, and by his own admission had little success helping Chicago neighborhoods cope with plant closings.

While Obama sponsored or co-sponsored measures involving welfare, health care and tax cuts in the Illinois legislature, to say he "passed" the laws, as if he were in a leadership post, overstates his role.

The Chicago Tribune made a similar report:

The ad says Obama "passed" several initiatives, giving him all the credit, although they are bills the Legislature passed and not the work of a single lawmaker.

Obama was more than one mere vote on the bills cited -- he was one of the leading negotiators who helped turn the legislation into law. He was not the only key player, but many politicians claim responsibility for passing laws that many have worked on.

.....But to suggest Obama personally "slashed the rolls by 80 percent" is a stretch; federal law signed by President Clinton required the state come up with a plan to trim the welfare rolls. Obama said he would have opposed Clinton's initiative.

Oh and that little part of the commercial where he says he was a financial consultant..well only if I can say I was an Olympic athlete this is from Analyze this:

Eventually a consulting house to multinational corporations agreed to hire me as a research assistant. Like a spy behind enemy lines, I arrived every day at my mid-Manhattan office and sat at my computer terminal, checking the Reuters machine that blinked bright emerald messages from across the globe. As far as I could tell I was the only black man in the company, a source of shame for me but a source of considerable pride for the company’s secretarial pool.

First, it wasn’t a consulting house; it was a small company that published newsletters on international business. Like most newsletter publishers, it was a bit of a sweatshop. I’m sure we all wished that we were high-priced consultants to multinational corporations. But we also enjoyed coming in at ten, wearing jeans to work, flirting with our co-workers, partying when we stayed late, and bonding over the low salaries and heavy workload.

Barack worked on one of the company’s reference publications. Each month customers got a new set of pages on business conditions in a particular country, punched to fit into a three-ring binder. Barack’s job was to get copy from the country correspondents and edit it so that it fit into a standard outline. There was probably some research involved as well, since correspondents usually don’t send exactly what you ask for, and you can’t always decipher their copy. But essentially the job was copyediting.

It’s also not true that Barack was the only black man in the company. He was the only black professional man. Fred was an African-American who worked in the mailroom with his son. My boss and I used to join them on Friday afternoons to drink beer behind the stacks of office supplies. That’s not the kind of thing that Barack would do. Like I said, he was somewhat aloof.

The Senator may be a liar and an embellisher, but there is one thing that you will never be able to say about Senator Obama:
"WHAT YOU SEE IS WHAT YOU GET"