FactCheck USA: top 10 claims

Updated on 04 November 2008

By Channel 4 News

As America goes to the polls, Channel 4 FactCheck picks our final top 10 dodgy campaign claims, as held up to the light by US fact check sites.

Obama has repeatedly claimed that McCain supports tax breaks for companies that send jobs overseas. In one TV ad, he focused on the plight of a company in Pennsylvania, saying McCain had sold out the workers.

But it's not true - the factory closed because the television parts it made were became obsolete, and no jobs were sent to China.

Find out more
FactCheck.org: Obama's trade trickery

Yesterday, an investigator for Alaska's State Personnel Board found Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin did not violate state ethics rules when she fired her state police commissioner after he in turn refused to fire her sister's estranged husband.

But this wasn't the finding of an earlier investigation. She claimed a month ago to have been cleared of "any hint of any kind of unethical activity" by State Legislative Council-commissioned report which in fact found she had breached the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act.

Find out more
Washington Post: four Pinocchios for Palin
Politifact: report finds Palin violated ethics laws

Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground group, is a common soapbox theme for the McCain campaign.

Vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin claimed Obama "pals around with terrorists", and McCain claims in this TV ad that Obama had lied about his association with the anti-Vietnam protestor, who set bombs intended to damage property during the sixties and seventies.

But Obama has condemned Ayers's radical past, and, according to FactCheck.org, has said nothing about his dealings with Ayers which has been shown to be untrue.

They met via the board of a pretty unradical school reform group, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which also included well-regarded members of the Chicago establishment, and there's no evidence of a deep or strong friendship.

Find out more
FactCheck.org: he lied about Bill Ayers

McCain's back on the soapbox, and his new bogeyman is Rashid Khalidi, professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University, and an Obama associate from his days at the University of Chicago.

Khalidi denies acting as a PLO spokesman in the seventies, when he taught at a university in Beirut, though the Washington Post FactChecker reckons this could be a question over semantics over whether he played a formal or informal role.

But this twisted and tenuous tale of Obama's guilt by association seems even less credible given that an organisation co-founded by Khalidi has received large sums of money from an organisation chaired by none other than senator John McCain.

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Washington Post: John McCain's trick or treat?

The spending may not be quite on the scale of Sarah Palin's $150,000 shopping spree, but tacked on to a quote from Mrs Obama saying that "someone is going to have to give up a piece of the pie" for the sake of universal health care and education, the Waldorf-Astoria hotel receipt was potentially damaging when it did the chain email rounds this month.

But it's a hoax - and has been retracted by the pro-Hillary Clinton political action committee that originally put it out. The real first-lady-in-waiting wasn't even in New York at the time the receipt was dated.

Find out more
FactCheck.org: did Michelle Obama spend $450 on room service?

Obama was indeed rated the most liberal senator in 2007 - he came 10th and 16th in the two previous years.

But a McCain TV ad then plays two clips of Obama denouncing this as a lie, but the clips are taken completely out of context.

In fact, Obama was speaking on two entirely separate matters - in the one quoted above, he was accusing McCain and Palin - correctly - of being untruthful about the "bridge to nowhere".

Find out more
FactCheck.org: 'lying' about being liberal?

During the second presidential debate, John McCain claimed Obama had voted for a $3m "overhead projector" for a planetarium in Chicago. Unnecessary pork-barrel spending, the maverick fumed.

Whether Obama's funding request is justified is a matter for debate, but the projector in question isn't the piece of office equipment McCain's remarks imply.

The Adler Planatarium last upgraded its projector in 1969; the 5,000lb piece of specialised equipment projects the night sky in a dome theatre and has several separate units to recreates the stars, sun, moon and planets.

Find out more
FactCheck.org: did Obama request a £3m overhead projector?

Obama may be the candidate who promises change, but this ad doesn't cut his opponent's change of heart any slack.

Technically, the claim is true - McCain has opposed embryonic stem cell in the past. But not since 2001, when the Arizona senator says he became convinced the potential benefits of outweighed any other considerations.

Find out more
FactCheck.org: Obama's stem cell spinning

There's been a lot of fuss over Obama's involvement with community activist group Acorn. The group, which pays part-time door-to-door canvassers to register people to vote, has had problems with its employees cutting corners by creating multiple registrations for voters.

But this isn't the same as voter fraud - it's not that the group has "sent people to the polls using bogus identities or to vote in any other fraudulent manner" points out FactCheck.org.

This doesn't mean Obama is squeaky clean - the site also finds that he underplayed his ties to the group during the final televised presidential debate.

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FactCheck.org: Acorn accusations

McCain twists Obama's words. Rather than dismissing Iran as tiny or insignificant, he was in fact urging direct negotiations with the country - and saying that if the USA could talk to the once-more-serious threat of the Soviet Union, it should now be able to engage with Iran.

Here are two longer extracts from his remarks:

"I mean, think about it," Obama said in May. "Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don't pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying we're going to wipe you off the planet."

"You know, Iran, they spend one-one hundredth of what we spend on the military. If Iran ever tried to pose a serious threat to us, they wouldn't stand a chance. And we should use that position of strength that we have to be bold enough to go ahead and listen."

Find out more
Politifact: 'tiny' ad makes large error

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