John McCain looked gravely out at the audience as he leveled one of dozens of charges against Democrat Barack Obama during the first presidential campaign of the 2008 election Friday.
"He has voted in the United States Senate to increase taxes on people who make as low as $42,000 a year," McCain said.
"That's not true, John. That's not true," said Obama.
"And that's just a fact," McCain said. "You can look it up."
Looking it up reveals, however, that it is largely untrue -- especially the inference that Obama set out to squeeze more taxes from wage earners. Nonetheless, the charge has been a staple of McCain's campaign ads.
"The ad continues McCain's pattern of misrepresenting Sen. Barack Obama's tax proposals as falling on middle-income families," the organization FactCheck.org has said. The claim comes from a March Senate vote on whether to continue President Bush's tax cuts; Obama's own plan includes no increases for anyone earning below $250,000.
In many ways, Friday's matchup between McCain and Obama was less a debate than a pair of side-by-side, long-playing campaign ads.
And, like ads, the claims and counterclaims had elements of truth and falsehood, and McCain was not the sole offender.
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Iran and Kissinger
The candidates each were right when they clashed over what former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said about the wisdom of holding diplomatic meetings with Iran.
Obama was right when he said that Kissinger, in a recent appearance with other secretaries of State in Washington, said U.S. officials should talk to Iranian officials without preconditions.
McCain, in response, mischaracterized what Obama had just said. He implied that Obama had said Kissinger approved of presidential level contacts with Iran. The Democrat did not say that.
Nevertheless, Kissinger later issued a statement to the Weekly Standard as if Obama had misspoken.
"Sen. McCain is right. I would not recommend the next president of the United States engage in talks with Iran at the presidential level. My views on this issue are entirely compatible with the views of my friend Sen. John McCain. We do not agree on everything, but we do agree that any negotiations with Iran must be geared to reality."
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Pakistan
McCain made an arguable assertion when he said that Pakistan was a "failed state" when former President Pervez Musharraf seized power in a 1999 coup. Many analysts have warned that the country has been at risk of becoming a failed state. But most do not believe it had reached that point in 1999.
