McCain Response to Obama DHL Ad
FactCheck.org just released a report calling Obama's recent ads accusing John McCain of costing Ohio jobs “false,” “misleading” and “unsubstantiated.” It's now clear that the Obama campaign's attack on John McCain and the DHL issue -- which Obama campaign manager David Plouffe called “the most important development in the campaign” -- is based on a lie.
Key points from FactCheck.org report:
Ads from the AFL-CIO and the Obama campaign claim that McCain is partly to blame for the loss of more than 8,000 jobs in Ohio. They paint a false picture. …
But the ads go too far. Some statements about McCain are misleading and some of the inferences the ads invite are unsubstantiated:
The ads charge that McCain opposition to a 2003 amendment helped DHL and amounted to turning his back on workers. That's misleading. McCain said he opposed a version of the amendment because it was a special project inserted into an unrelated bill, not to help DHL. And the Teamsters union praised the merger at the time, saying that it would lead to more jobs. And at first, more jobs indeed followed.
The ads also imply that the DHL merger is a direct cause of the job losses in Ohio, which we find to be both unlikely and unsubstantiated. Airborne Express had laid off 2,000 employees before the merger, and analysts at the time said that the struggling carrier would need to make expensive investments in its international infrastructure to remain competitive. …
Moreover the ads go too far in attributing motives to McCain. The Arizona senator has long crusaded against the practice of inserting pet projects into spending bills, and his April 17 press release lists the Stevens amendment as just one of the spending bill's 51 earmarks and 16 policy changes that he opposed. We can't judge people's motives, but we've seen no evidence to suggest that McCain's activities were directed at helping DHL do anything at all. And certainly we've seen nothing to suggest that McCain "turned his back on" Wilmington's workers.
