The gloves are off in the presidential race to the White House. The blows have been brutal but just because they’re hard hitting doesn’t necessarily mean they’re factual. The runners in the race are Senator John McCain for the Republicans and Senator Barack Obama for the Democrats. Like a relay race certain issues are handed off to one another, which I certainly think will be the case when President George W. Bush finishes his leg and maybe hands his baton over to Senator McCain. However if Senator Obama is elected President of the United States of America he promises to bring “change” into his leg of the lap, leaving many citizen’s of the country to ask “change” to what? In watching Senator Obama’s Official campaign ad the “Country I Love”, we realize just how vague politicians and their writers can be and still sway voters. What exactly are the signs of deception we should look for? The signs that we are used to come in all different shapes and sizes, colors and lights, but these signs are much more subtle, hence, much more dangerous as Jackson and Jamieson write about in their book Unspun: finding facts in a world of [disinformation].

For instance, in Senator Obama’s campaign ad he talks about strong families and strong values while being cradled in the arms of his Caucasian mother, which may be a ploy to you saying, “root for my side”, the side that is clearly of both colors, both races, both sexes. It’s probable that he wants us to feel safe and comfortable and secure like in the loving arms of a doting mother. While the picture of him and his mother is shown he reads that he grew up in Kansas where he was taught “Kansas values”. I’m not sure exactly what Kansas values are, and I’m sure that most everyone else doesn’t either, but I wonder if he was instilled the value of being taught Spanish like he wants today’s children to learn to accommodate the growing legal and illegal Hispanic community as he said during one of his rallies a few days ago?

His next presidential goal is as old as the bible; treat your neighbors as you would want to be treated. I guess the following woman didn’t get that memo, or was it blown way out of proportion? According to a story in the Chicago Sun-Times dated April 8th, 2008, Linda Ramirez-Sliwinski, a Hispanic woman who was an elected Obama delegate, was asked by his campaign to step down from her delegator position due to a comment she had made to her and her neighbor’s children on her neighbor’s land. Linda stepped over to her neighbor’s property to tell the children to “stop acting like little monkeys” in the tree where they had built a tree-house to play in. Overhearing this comment being made the neighbors children's mother, a female African American, complained of Linda using a racial slur in regards to the “monkey” comment. Linda was asked to step down from her official position due to her remarks being “divisive and unacceptable.” Is this the “frame it and claim it” (46) type of policy decision that will be made during his term? What is the next step? Will we still, as Americans, be able to say something that’s eating bananas in the forest, scratching his armpits, and eating lice of his buddies head, is a “monkey”?

Obama’s ad campaign includes “the literally true falsehood” (58) in an almost perfect scenario, this deception tactic is defined as “…words that are deceptive without being strictly, technically false” (58). A claim that Obama makes in his ad is that he took loans out and worked to support himself and pay his way through college. Slightly true, but true none the less, Obama shares in his self-proclaimed biography “Dreams From My Father” that he worked two jobs during his time at college; one at a construction site and the other at a large Chicago law office. This was confirmed when a representative of www.factcheck.org asked Tommy Vietor, an official Obama spokesman, and he agreed with that the employment information in the biography was indeed, correct. Another “literally true falsehood” (58) is brought to light when Obama talks in his ad about refusing offers of a job on Wall Street to help “neighborhoods devastated when steel plants closed.” This is also a partial-truth, Howard Kurtz from the Washington Post writes “Obama may have turned down Wall Street jobs after graduating from Columbia University in 1983, but he spent a year working from Business International Corporation in New York before becoming a community organizer in Chicago”.
Obama narrates in his ad about creating and passing a bill to generate “extended healthcare for wounded veterans”, but according to www.wisegop.org , a Wisconsin Republican Party website, “Obama missed the vote on the legislation…which passed the Senate with an Overwhelming Bipartisan Majority.” Another bill he actually did put through as Chief Co-Sponsor with Senator Hilary Clinton in May of 1997 was the bill “moving people from welfare to work”. Not longer after it’s passing, says the Wisconsin website, he proclaimed “I’m not a defender of the status quo with respect to welfare. Having said that, I probably would not have supported the federal legislation, because I think it had some problems.” He brags today, in his campaign ad, about passing this particular bill.

The ad ends with Obama’s voice, in a rich soothing tone, telling his viewers that he should be President because he “never forgot those values” and that he “approved this message”. What message did he approve though, the message that you were supposed to believe, or the real truth? Would it be better to be ignorant in your bliss, believing the old adage “what you don’t know won’t kill you?” Or would knowing the whole truth make any difference considering that most of us already have are mind made up anyway? Which brings me to my next point:

I learned some truth about myself when getting to those real truths about Obama. I realized that I am, indeed, a cross between a “moon bat” and a “psychotic deceiver” (69). I will now refer to my ideals, opinions, and self as a “psychotic bat”, understanding that I have fallen into the deceptive trap of “sacrificing sanity for the sake of consistency” and “seeking out weak evidence to support…existing beliefs, and…ignore evidence that undercuts those beliefs” (69). I recognized that I have become extremely close-minded in reference to my political preference of candidates until, during my research, I saw all the extremely positive changes in policy that Senator Obama had tried to pass that had just died in Congress without anyone even knowing, or was I just not paying attention? Should it be the Presidential candidate the country should be so focused on, or should it be the people that prevent their great ideas from ever being born?