Response to Katsman / Bardash “Obama makes things up” JPost article
Abraham Katsman and Kory Bardash, two of the Jerusalem Post’s Republican attack dogs, jump on the “Obama has no experience” bandwagon in this August 17 article, subtitled “why Obama makes things up.” While they’re right that Obama has occasionally exaggerated his record, for the most part it is they, and not Obama, who “make things up,” in their scurrilous attempt to convince their readers that Obama’s many noteworthy accomplishments do not exist.
Here is the only example they cite in which it could legitimately be said that Obama intentionally exaggerated his accomplishments:
Take Obama’s first general election ad. We are told that Obama “passed laws” that “extended healthcare for wounded troops who’d been neglected,” with a citation at the bottom to only one Senate bill: The 2008 Defense Authorization Bill, which passed the Senate by a 91-3 vote. Six Senators did not vote- including Obama. Nor is there evidence that he contributed to its passage in any material way. So, his claim to have “passed laws” amounts to citing a bill that was largely unopposed, that he didn’t vote for, and whose passage he didn’t impact. Even his hometown Chicago Tribune caught this false claim . It’s classic résumé-padding–falsely taking credit for the work of others.
Katsman and Bardash would have been fine if they had merely pointed out that Obama exaggerated his contribution to the Defense Authorization bill. The non-partisan FactCheck.org agrees that he overstated his contribution, something which is generally considered neither atypical nor a fatal flaw in a politician.
However, Katsman and Bardash strayed from the truth when they implied that Obama said “laws” but cited only one. In fact, the phrase “passed laws” in the ad was followed by a listing of three laws, not just the one that Katsman and Bardash cited, and Obama was indeed instrumental in the passage of the other two.
Katsman and Bardash also mislead in their claim that Obama did not contribute to the Defense Authorization bill “in any material way.” Several provisions of the final bill were taken from bills that Obama sponsored. That is, some of the text in the bill was written by Obama, which is very nearly the definition of a “material” contribution.
So, here we have Katsman and Bardash starting with the tiniest kernel of truth and blowing it up into a parody of the truth. While accusing Obama of exaggeration, they engage in absurd exaggeration themselves.
They continue:
Or take one of Obama’s standard lines: his claim of “twenty years of public service.” As pundit Michael Medved has pointed out, the numbers don’t add up.
The non-partisan PolitiFact.com disagrees. See:
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2008/mar/07/obamas-20-years-experience/
Katsman and Bardash’s next jab comes in the form of mocking Obama for a slip of the tongue:
Obama made yet another inflated boast last month during his visit to Israel. At his press conference in Hamas rocket-bombarded Sderot, Obama talked up “his” efforts to protect Israel from Iran:
“Just this past week, we passed out of the US Senate Banking Committee - which is my committee - a bill to call for divestment from Iran as way of ratcheting up the pressure to ensure that they don’t obtain a nuclear weapon.”
Nice try. But as even CNN noted, Obama is not even on that committee.
CNN also noted Obama’s subsequent explanation that it was a simple slip of the tongue, and what he meant to say was that it was his bill, not his committee. He wrote a substantial portion of the bill that was finally passed out of committee. See:
http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/banach/gGxyVm
Katsman and Bardash surely know that every minute of Obama’s trip to Israel was intensely scrutinized and critiqued. Indeed, as shown by their article currently under discussion, they were among the ones doing the critiquing. They therefore surely realize that it would be absurd for Obama to intentionally exaggerate something like this, an exaggeration which would surely be immediately exposed as a falsehood and used to attack him (as they did). They therefore surely realize that the explanation and apology offered afterwards by Obama, that he simply misspoke, is far more reasonable than their assertion that he intentionally claimed to chair a committee which he isn’t even on.
Katsman and Bardash claim, “That is one peculiar ‘mistake’ to simply have made by accident.” But it is not at all a surprising mistake for someone who, as Obama told Bibi Netanyahu during his trip, was so jetlagged and tired that he “could fall asleep now standing up.”
Would someone with Obama’s stellar list of job titles resort to making stuff up? He seems to think he has to. In spite of the many impressive positions he’s held, he’s done almost nothing with them. If he wants to claim specific, relevant accomplishments, his only resort is to stretching the truth.
The non-partisan FactCheck.org says, “In fact, Obama sponsored more than 800 bills during his eight years as an Illinois state senator. And his U.S. Senate career, while brief, has been action-packed.” Furthermore, they quote a detailed list of specific, relevant accomplishments rattled off by Obama during one of the Democratic primary debates, and they confirm that all of them were accurate.
See also this article, which deals with the general question of Obama’s experience and specifically with his accomplishments throughout his career (scroll down to point 5, “Obama has quite a bit more experience than some give him credit for,” if you don’t want to read the whole article).
Katsman and Bardash move on to Obama’s time as a professor at the University of Chicago:
Similarly, as the New York Times recently pointed out, Obama spent twelve years on the University of Chicago Law School faculty–singularly famous for its intellectual ferment and incubator of scholarship–and produced not even a single scholarly paper .
Generally speaking, academic papers are written and published by full-time, career academics (hence the adage “publish or perish”). Obama was never a full-time faculty member, nor did he wish to be; he was teaching at the University while holding down a job working as a civil-rights attorney. Speaking as someone who had to put up with many professors at college who spent far more time working on their research than effectively teaching their students, I’m quite happy that Obama made civil-rights work and teaching his priorities. He apparently did quite a good job at the university, since all indications are that he was a good teacher and very well-liked by his students.
In short, this is entirely irrelevant.
Going back even further, Katsman and Bardash attempt to discredit Obama’s tenure as president of the Harvard Law Review:
He was President of Harvard Law Review, but wrote nothing himself.
In fact, the president of the Review decides what is published in every issue and is deeply involved in the content of everything that is published. According to politico.com, Obama’s responsibilities as president of the Review “included leading discussions and debates to determine what to print from the mountain of submissions from judges, scholars and authors from across the country, supervising the thorough editing of each issue’s contents and giving every article what’s known as a ‘P-read’ once it was finally considered ready for publication.”
How well Obama did as president of the Review should be judged by its quality during his tenure, not by how many papers he himself published. Those who are in a position to judge this universally agree that Obama did an excellent job. Since Katsman and Bardash obviously don’t want to admit that, they resort to irrelevant, specious comments about the fact that Obama didn’t publish any articles himself.
In summary, like so many of the anti-Obama smears that have been circulated during this campaign, this particular article takes a few kernels of truth and embellishes them with a raft of lies, misleading statements, and intentional omissions to create a narrative which is as far removed from reality as John McCain is from his former maverick image.